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

[Ian Cooper <ian at THE-COOPERS.ORG>]

--On Thursday, March 28, 2002 12:25 -0800 Mark Atwood <mra at pobox.com> wrote:

> "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.

True, though I thought LOC counting was done as an initial metric until 
(much) better things were found.

> 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.")

I found the parts of the document that would enable more subjective 
measurements (like documenting the progress of documents within the group) 
more interesting than the actual "counting".