Have you ever thought the metrics measured against you as a code monkey to be unfair or a waste? Well you could be right. According to the results of a survey released this week by by Forrester Consulting metrics for developers are deemed too complicated and they are too hard to create in the first place. Surprised? Probably not.

To cite an example of poor metrics used I was recently talking to a developer who is measured by the lines of code produced and another to reduce the number of bugs — metrics that would appear to make sense. Add into this that the tester also has a metric based on the number of bugs he finds, and you start to see the conflict.

If the developer does his job too well and surpasses his KPI then the tester’s KPI looks bad and conversely if the tester does exceedingly well then the developer looks exceedingly bad.

One would hope that the managers would have the sense to never base their performance judgements on a single metric that is flawed and highly susceptible to circumstance — I did say “hope”.

As the article states: “Organisations sometimes do not get the right metrics in the first place because of the level of work involved in getting hold of them, according to the report. ‘The number-one obstacle to gathering meaningful metrics is the manual effort involved’.”

Moving across to blogosphere, this week we had another installment from Ivar Jacobson and Ina Fried detailed how the next version of Windows would incorporate the touch technology found in the iPhone.

Brendon Chase conducted a survey and found ten reasons why the rest of the office hates the IT department.

Perhaps the loathing of IT is really due to IT being the harbingers of disease, thanks to bad management.

“More than a third (37 percent) of organisations that are performing well have ‘accessible’ management teams, whereas more than half (56 percent) of declining companies display bureaucratic tendencies and a quarter have a ‘secretive’ environment.”

A good weekend to all, for those of you pushing through to Christmas, we’ll be with you next week as well.