Re: I-D ACTION:draft-etal-ietf-analysis-00.txt

[Mark Atwood <mra at pobox.com>]

"John Stracke" <jstracke at incentivesystems.com> writes:
> 
> And the authors do caution that their numbers are blind to the quality of 
> the RFCs.  Their point, though, is that looking at the easy metrics is 
> better than not measuring anything at all; it gives a first-order 
> approximation.

I disagree.

Some metrics (lines of code written per day, number of bugs found per
person, etc) are *actively* harmful to gather & report.

Counting RFCs looks like it's bad the same way that pure LOC counts
are bad.

Saying "we must measure *something*" is the Politician's Fallacy ("we
must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this.")

-- 
Mark Atwood   | Well done is better than well said.
mra at pobox.com | 
http://www.pobox.com/~mra