But what if you could actually measure the outcome that you want? Not code coverage metrics, but customer satisfaction or decreased calls to tech support.

Or, hell, what about rewarding people for helping to build a culture of quality within your organization by rewarding those who are able to help others learn techniques for developing better software (okay, I guess this is a proxy too – but I’d rather work for an organization that gives some thought to which people to reward based on their actions rather than blindly rewarding whoever has the best #s from some automated code analysis tool).

I know people like to obsess on the easy to measure code metrics but I feel like that’s just taking the easy way out . I’m sure it’s harder to come up with measurements that are more closely tied to the behaviors we actually want to get. But, it strikes me that if we can be agile and iterative with developing the software, then the companies we work for should be able to be agile and iterative with determining the best way to reward people for delivering the results we want. And if people eventually find ways to game the system, maybe that’s all the more reason to keep changing the way those rewards are determined. Just a thought…