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this topic is so close to my heart just yesterday i posted about my new project which measures these metrics(don't worry will not plug it here!) My take is that your measurment should give you some actionable insight and you should not measure absolute values. For example incident count, this looks like a useless metric to me because i can't tell what does high or low value mean, i also would need to look at team size to get anything useful out of it and that would not be very useful either. Same thing goes for lines of code, would 4 lines of lisp code mean i am less productive than 20 lines of c code?

Instead measure ratio of outgoing requests to incoming request if this ratio is greater than one or approaching one than you will not be able to execute with your current plan since you are not able to dispose issues in time. Your team is in danger zone and there is a risk of burnout of your team and non delivery of the project. This is also useful because you can go to the management team and tell them you need additional headcount and present this data and you are likely to get your request approved since it is backed by data.

Same thing goes for other metrics as well. Your metrics should be related to your goals they should clearly tell you if you can achieve your goal and how near/far you are from it.

Last but not the least don't forget about human touch since you are managing humans. Metrics should just be the starting point to dig deeper to solve the organizational issue they should not be used as final goal.




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