The Invaluable Project Metrics
The software engineering community has been placing a great
deal of emphasis lately on metrics and their use in software
development. The following metrics are probably among the most
valuable for a software project:
The Pizza Metric
How: Count the number of pizza boxes in the lab.
What: Measures the amount of schedule under-estimation. If people
are spending enough after-hours time working on the project that
they need to have meals delivered to the office, then there has
obviously been a mis-estimation somewhere.
The Aspirin Metric
How: Maintain a centrally-located aspirin bottle for use by the
team. At the beginning and end of each month, count the number of
aspirin remaining aspirin in the bottle.
What: Measures stress suffered by the team during the project.
This most likely indicates poor project design in the early phases,
which causes over-expenditure of effort later on. In the early
phases, high aspirin-usage probably indicates that the product's
goals or other parameters were poorly defined.
The Beer Metric
How: Invite the team to a beer bash each Friday. Record the total
bar bill.
What: Closely related to the Aspirin Metric, the Beer Metric
measures the frustration level of the team. Among other things,
this may indicate that the technical challenge is more difficult
than anticipated.
The Creeping Feature Metric
How: Count the number of features added to the project after the
design has been signed off, but that were not requested by any
requirements definition.
What: This measures schedule slack. If the team has time to add
features that are not necessary, then there was too much time
allocated to a schedule task.
The "Duck!" Metric
How: This one is tricky, but a likely metric would be to count the
number of engineers that leave the room when a marketing person
enters. This is only valid after a requirements document has been
finalized.
What: Measures the completeness of the initial requirements. If
too many requirements changes are made after the product has been
designed, then the engineering team will be wary of marketing, for
fear of receiving yet another change to a design which met all
initial specifications.
The Status Report Metric
How: Count the total number of words dedicated to the project in
each engineer's status report.
What: This is a simple way to estimate the smoothness with which
the project is running. If things are going well, an item will
likely read, "I talked to Fred; the widgets are on schedule." If
things are not going as well, it will say, "I finally got in touch
with Fred after talking to his phone mail for nine days straight.
It appears that the widgets will be delayed due to snow in the
Ozarks, which will cause the whoozits schedule to be put on hold
until widgets arrive. If the whoozits schedule slips by three
weeks, then the entire project is in danger of missing the July
deadline."