| The Pizza Metric: |
How:
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Count the number of pizza boxes in the lab. |
| What: |
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Measures the amount of schedule under-estimation. If
people are spending enough after-hours time working on the project
that they need to have meals delivered to the office, then there has
obviously been a mis-estimation somewhere. |
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| The Aspirin Metric: |
| How: |
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Maintain a centrally-located aspirin bottle for use
by the team. At the beginning and end of each month, count the number
of aspirin remaining aspirin in the bottle. |
| What: |
|
Measures stress suffered by the team during the project.
This most likely indicates poor project design in the early phases,
which causes over-expenditure of effort later on. In the early phases,
high aspirin-usage probably indicates that the products goals or other
parameters were poorly defined. |
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| The Beer Metric: |
| How: |
|
Invite the team to a beer bash each Friday. Record
the total bar bill.
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What:
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Closely related to the Aspirin Metric, the Beer Metric
measures the frustration level of the team. Among other things, this
may indicate that the technical challenge is more difficult than anticipated.
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| The Creeping Feature Metric: |
| How: |
|
Count the number of features added to the project after
the design has been signed off, but that were not requested by any
requirements definition. |
| What: |
|
This measures schedule slack. If the team has time
to add features that are not necessary, then there was too much time
allocated to a schedule task.
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| The "Duck!" Metric: |
| How: |
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This one is tricky, but a likely metric would be to
count the number of engineers that leave the room when a marketing
person enters. This is only valid after a requirements document has
been finalized |
| What: |
|
Measures the completeness of the initial requirements.
If too many requirements changes are made after the product has been
designed, then the engineering team will be wary of marketing, for
fear of receiving yet another change to a design which met all initial
specifications.
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| The Status Report Metric: |
| How: |
|
Count the total number of words dedicated to the project
in each engineer's status report.
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| What: |
|
This is a simple way to estimate the smoothness with
which the project is running. If things are going well, an item will
likely read, "I talked to Fred; the widgets are on schedule."
If things are not going as well, it will say, "I finally got
in touch with Fred after talking to his phone mail for nine days straight.
It appears that the widgets will be delayed due to snow in the Ozarks,
which will cause the whoozits schedule to be put on hold until widgets
arrive. If the whoozits schedule slips by three weeks, then the entire
project is in danger of missing the July deadline." |