I never really intended to start blogging about my work kitchen, but it keeps providing me with anecdotes.  Today, I was thinking about the milk.  There are six fridges in the office, and typically you'll find that they each have eight semi-skimmed jugs of milk.  There's also a single jug of skimmed milk.  Sometimes there's none.  So, someone somewhere has made a decision as to the appropriate amount of skimmed and semi-skimmed milk to provide.  Now we enter the realms of pure speculation, but bear with me. How do you determine what the mix should be? ...

Okay, I promised I'd stop talking about metrics, but it occurred to me that there's a serious point I hadn't covered: sometimes your measures are broken, and you need to fix the measure before it's going to tell you anything useful.  The classic example of this is error reporting: if you're reporting too many errors, you won't notice when something serious is going on.  I once saw a system that generated 2400 errors a week.  That's under unexceptional circumstances.  Assuming you spent 30 seconds on each error, that would take over half your week. It doesn't take a genius to...

I've already talked about Patrick's measures of code quality.  His approach is to take a very direct mathematical and analytical approach to it.  I appreciate the sophistication of the tools he's using, but I think that the results of this kind of analysis need to be treated with the same level of suspicion as an analyst treats a set of accounts.  e.g. Cash flow is hard to fake, but why are the accruals so low? Ayende, on the other hand, argues for a very different approach.  He lists as his measures of code quality: Peer code review (especially...

I recently pointed out to a (rather drunk) friend that successful processes are easier to follow than not follow.  He remarked that I could usefully spend a career on the direct consequences of that statement.  It occurred to me that, rather than give up code forever, I might usefully note down some of my thoughts on the subject.  A note: I've been both a chief and an indian in various organizations, and have moved between the two roles more than once.  This has given me a certain perspective on processes, both why they are important, and why they are a...

I've been trying to stick together a few notes about what I've learnt about process design and implementation over the years.  The "short notes" just keep getting longer and longer.  However, this story is worth repeating and should illustrates one rule that everyone should know by now is: never link a metric to cash.  It seems like the most sensible thing in the world to give out bonuses on the basis of deliverables.  It's not, it will damage your department and your firm.  If you're lucky, you'll know how.  If you're unlucky, you'll never find out. Let me give an...