In this episode Federico and Matthew talk about product metrics. Metrics are a common technique used by management to measure progress towards some goal, but they are not without risks. This show lays ground to understand what are product metrics and common pitfalls to avoid.
Attribute: measurable physical or abstract property of an entity.
Measurement: the assignment of numbers to objects or events according to a rule derived from a model or theory.
Metric: a measurement function.
Quality Factor: a type of attribute. A management-oriented attribute of software that contributes to its quality.
Software quality metric: a function whose inputs are software data and whose output is a single numerical value that can be interpreted as the degree to which software possesses a given attribute that affect its quality.
Requirement statement
The most important aspect when designing a metric is to think about the intended goal.
"To [understand, evaluate, control, predict] the [attribute of the entity] in order to [goal]"
Metric design
Goal -> Questions -> Metric
Evaluation of a metric
How much do we need to know about an attribute before it is reasonable considering measuring it?
How do we know if we have really measured the attribute we wanted to measure?
Direct and indirect measurements.
Distortion: metric creates incentives for the employee to allocate his time so as to make the measurements look better rather than to optimize for achieving business goals.
Dysfunction: if optimizing for a measurement so distorts the employee's behavior that he provides less value to the organization than he would have provided in the absence of measurement.
Examples of bad metrics:
Bug counts as a metric of the work of testers and programmers.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are the personal opinions
of Matthew, Federico, and their guests and do not represent their employer's view
in any way.
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