benlm

There's a book out there called "Codermetrics", the community site is at http://codermetrics.org/.

Here's the premise:

"Many of the ideas borrow from the use of advanced statistics to analyze sports teams, such as sabermetrics in baseball, and the book Codermetrics has even been referred to as “Moneyball for software teams.” Codermetrics seeks to define a clear and objective way to identify, analyze, and discuss the strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures of software teams and their individual members."

What would your reaction be to something like that being implemented where you work? Assuming you are self reporting your data, do you see benefit in being able to replace (to some extent) subjectiveness with real, quantitative data that reflect your performance, or would you rebel against this as bureaucratic nonsense that should be shut down at once?

One advantage could be taking the emphasis away from misleading metrics that many managers probably use right now, such number of code commits and/or lines of code, and replacing it with something (hopefully) more meaningful.

I think a lot would depend on implementation, too. If management tried to use this as a way to strictly monitor performance I think it would be doomed to fail, but if the aim was to empower teams to improve themselves then perhaps it has a brighter outlook.

NB. I am not in any way affiliated with the book, just interested.

Thoughts?