Last year I reported on a company introducing a single metric for measuring development team efficiency. I predicted it would be a harmful failure. Recently I had on update on how it was all working out. And… err… I was wrong.

As it turns out the people running the programme were quite sensible and smart: instead of driving teams to a particular target, they simply measured and investigated anomalies; that way they uncovered gaming (such as the team checking in open source projects to affect their score), and were also able to feed back their findings into the metric. Interestingly they found that the teams adopting Agile practices tended to core more highly.

In his book The Power of Intuition, psychologist Gary Klein recommends that metrics be used as trip-wires rather than guides: when metrics breach certain levels then that is a cause for investigation not immediate action.

Well done the metrics guys at, err the big company. And as for me – well sometimes it is a pleasure to be proved wrong.