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

2002-03-28 14:00:02
--On Thursday, March 28, 2002 12:25 -0800 Mark Atwood 
<mra(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:

"John Stracke" <jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)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".