alt Hacker News> Measure. Measure. Measure.
The problem is knowing what to measure. There's another saying
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
As an example from memory, there was a game dev company that celebrated they had maxed out the cores on the PS3. That didn't mean anything though, anyone can max out the cores by filing them with bad code. But hey, their "measurement" told them they had maxed out the machine
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groundzeros2015 • yesterday at 10:17 PM
That quote mostly applies to human organizations where the connection between outcome and metric is questionable. Or where incentives unexpectedly change behavior.
If your goal is fast software it can be measured quantively and you’re likely to improve the actual thing using those metrics.
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> The problem is knowing what to measure.
This can be a problem, but much less so because so often we're doing "easy mode" where we don't need a proxy. The "it ceases to be a good measure" is because you're measuring a proxy. You wanted to deliver happiness, you measured wealth because it was easier to measure but seemed correlated and now you've got rich miserable people, oops. But software engineers can often measure the actual thing they want to improve directly, not a proxy and so it cannot cease to be a good measure.