Corey Haines on Metrics

Corey Haines is more a pure developer-type who does test automation, and he is heavily involved in the "Software Craftsmanship" movement. He's made a bit of a name for himself by travelling around the country, pairing and interviewing other practitioners who are serious about doing a good job in software work, with a development emphaisis.

And he just released a video on metrics ...

Road Thoughts - Visible Metrics from Corey Haines on Vimeo.

Now, these are dev-facing metrics, culled from the codebase and automated tests themselves. You wouldn't have to enter these into a spreadsheet and email them to your boss once a week, nor would your company have to pay a few thousand dollars per person for a tool to do this for you. So it has certain inherent advantages over most test metrics.

That said, I like the general idea: That a practitioner would take a series of measures in order to personally understand and improve in his work.

This is very different from many metrics discussions, where it is assumed that management will consume the metrics for the purposes of evaluation.

The former one has a good chance of working. The latter tends to introduce dysfunction, as the team will find ways to give management lots of whatever they are measured by, and this may or may not correlate to actual improvement.