

Ask HN: What metrics do you measure? - cauterized

On a team level (as opposed to an individual developer level), what metrics do you like to use to measure and improve software development speed, quality, and efficiency?
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dlu
Those are terribly hard things to measure with metrics. Please for the love of
all things beautiful may no one list out "number of bugs" as something they
measure.

A lot of this gets covered in retrospectives. Making sure that you don't
repeat similar mistakes over and over again and that the team is evolving
rather than becoming static. I tend to focus more on how well we hit our goals
(including business goals) so that will include things like, "Are we getting
better at estimates?" It could also informally include, are Dev1 and Dev2
arguing less and communicating better?

I usually leave metrics to the product side. Find your version of Facebook's
"7 friends in 10 days"

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Rikishei
At my job, where I am a tester, "number of bugs" is one of the most prominent
metrics in our evaluation. I have tried to talk 3 of my bosses out of that (2
of which are engineers, one of them has a masters degree in some area of
computing), but to no avail. Sigh...

OP: Do NOT use bug count, for all that is holy.

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steverb
The only metric I've found personally useful is cycle time / complexity. How
long does it take to go from a request to deployed, working software?

Yes, it can be gamed, but if you're incentivizing developers to game your
system, then you're probably using it wrong.

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Someone1234
On a team level?

Total lines of code added (starting at total lines removed, then counting
upwards). We want to see +150 per developer/week otherwise the TL has to
explain it to the GM. We also have a manager who run a code consistency
checker and flag any submits which don't conform to the standards (e.g. {} not
on their own line, variables named incorrectly, etc). There are also reports
that come out of the CS ticket system against each part of the system which
are meant to be bug reports (most aren't) which we need to fix and close,
teams are ranked against each other on fewest reports and most closed/month.

~~~
lambdafunc
>> We also have a manager who run a code consistency checker and flag any
submits which don't conform to the standards

Why don't you do this during build time using build plugins or using commit
hooks instead of a manager doing it?

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Someone1234
Because it has to be recorded for their annual review.

