Larry OstermanLARRY'S RULES OF SOFTWAREENGINEERING #2:MEASURING TESTERS BYTEST METRICS DOESN'T1
Larry Osterman introduces this piece with the words, "This one's likely to get a bit controversial." I disagree. I don't think it's controversial at all: it's absolutely and completely true that any attempt to measure the quality or productivity of testers by test metrics doesn't work. Most people just don't know it. Yet.
In fact, the same holds for developers, and managers, and just about anyone else doing knowledge work. The minute you try to measure how good a tester or developer is, using any metric you can think up, it will take only a few minutes for the tester or developer to optimize for that metric, i.e., game the system, in a way that gets ...
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