If you can’t distort the data, just don’t look at it

A sad reminder of the state of affairs comes from Curious Cat Management when it comes to conflicts of interest between the data and one’s own goals.  It is challenging to act with integrity when you are able to manipulate the facts to meet your own ends.  Just yesterday I ran into a baffling extension of distorting the data:  if you have data which tells a bad story about your own organization, hide it!

In my case, I was discussing a proposed MBF with a superior of mine.  I think like many organizations that deliver services we rely on three key areas of measurement:  Speed of delivery, cost of delivery and quality of delivery.  For some reason, we rarely measure the functionality of the delivery, but that’s another story…

Ignoring speed for the moment, there exists a paradox between the cost and quality aspects of delivery.  It is generally thought that driving up quality will result in an increase in cost as well.  The innovation in a process is breaking this supposed relationship – drive up quality and drive down cost.

For that reason, I proposed two measures as the basis for our MBF.  The first we already use today in some form:  defects per thousand lines of code (KLOC).  My proposal for the second was cost per KLOC.  I’m going to put aside the concerns about whether KLOC is a valid way to measure productivity.  While function point analysis resolves many of concerns regarding lines of code metrics, our organization lacks the maturity to think in those terms.  Fortunately, Capers Jones gives us a nice table in Applied Software Measurement which allows us to compare differing languages on a level plane.

Regardless, we don’t measure productivity at all today.  To me, it’s just obvious – any measurement of productivity is better than having no measurement at all.  Unless of course, you are heading up the organization whose productivity is abysmal.  And that is what I ran into the other day.  Why was my proposed MBF nixed?  Had I stumbled onto something that my superior did not want to share?

I’m still seething that someone would turn a blind eye to a productivity problem for fear of how it might reflect on them.  People are not stupid and even if you choose to never measure something then you lack any basis to dispel myths about your productivity or compare it to your peers.  Sure, it sucks to be the worst, but this is also your motivation to not be in last place.  The presence of data (even in the worst MBFs) drives action.  The lack of data allows you to put your head back in the sand and pretend it isn’t there.  It is there, but if it helps you sleep better at night to ignore the problem, go right ahead.  The problem will be waiting for you when you come back to work the next day as long as you refuse to act on it.