Coming Clean

Somehow or another I have landed myself on a committee to define requirements and select a tool for capturing process metrics. Even though the email was all spiffy inviting me to participate, I knew there was a background watermark of “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”. I should have given heed to the sign.

So now here I am, in a group of process and metrics weenies. As far as I can tell, I’m the lone real software engineer – though I think there is a person or two from a software background or who has dabbled as part of a software team (they give me some amount of sympathy).

I’m somewhat ambivalent to the whole thing, and I know it shows. But it’s not that I’m not interested – it’s just that I’m not interested in how they want to proceed. When I start saying things like “If you want to capture metrics, then give engineers a tool that politely and humanely lets them go through the process like engineers who are actually doing their job, and then glean/scrape your metrics out of that,” I get a lot of forlorn and exasperated looks. The unspoken response is: “Sure, that’d be great … but there’s nothing like that out there, and we’re talking about a lot more than just code reviews here.” And, of course, the underlying truth of it all is that this isn’t about process or process improvement – this an exercise of CYA vis-a-vis metrics collection.

And the whole “this isn’t just for code reviews” is really what makes all of this the most intolerable for me. We’re gathering metrics for defects found in different artifacts at different project phases. So, while something like Review Board would be abso-frickin-lutely awesome for me … it’s inappropriate (at least in the minds of the powers that be of this group) for the breadth of scope of this committee’s task. Suggesting that we use the right tool for the right project phase is probably going to be lost on them: “But, we’re collecting the same kind of data regardless of the phase!!” … nevermind that the process of which the data is generated differs between phases.

I need to refine my issue with that last bit there – that’s where I’m continually dismissed in this little piece of non-fun-ness I’m involved in. Any thoughts on the issue would be appreciated