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Misleading Metrics
Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” – Albert Einstein
The software development industry has a poor track record for developing and employing effective software metrics. This is because most of the metrics selected are tangential to the true goal of software development--delivering business value--and instead focus on software attributes and accounting measures.
Metrics such as lines-of-code per developer week, function points created, hours worked or budget consumed appear to be important measures, but they have dangerous and counterproductive implications. The use of these metrics reward the wrong behaviour; the phrase “you get what you measure” highlights the problem. By tracking lines of code written, visible and unconscious incentives to generate lots of code are established. On the surface, this may seem attractive. As a manger of a project, it is gratifying to see lots of code being written. But what is really required is functionality completed, business value generated and customers satisfied.
The more code generated, the harder a system is to maintain and extend. With incentives like lines-of-code written, how do value-adding activities like refactoring simplifications appear? Reducing 20,000 lines of code to 15,000 is a good thing, but …
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