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Mirror, Mirror on the way, what is the vainest metric of them all?

Mirror, Mirror on the way, what is the vainest metric of them all?

Paul Stack

May 05, 2019
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  1. 1. A company creates a new application 2. A PR

    email was created and sent out 3. 100,000 people arrived on the landing page for the application Is the measurement of 100,000 page views a real metric or a vanity metric and why?
  2. 1. A company creates a new application 2. A PR

    email was created and sent out 3. 100,000 people arrived on the landing page for the application
 
 
 4. The rate of conversion from page view to application download
  3. We can apply these questions to any measurement and help

    us to decide if it’s important or not
  4. Twitter followers Blog pageviews Greens at the end of a

    conference talk Number of GitHub commits Number of GH issues / PRs Build Times Number of builds per day Number of GH stars / forks Number of Application Downloads
  5. Number of “story points” achieved per sprint Estimation planning accuracy

    Meetings Cost of Infrastructure Cost of Travel Cost of Developer Productivity Code coverage!! Lines of code per day! Did I miss any?
  6. WIP (work in progress) Cycle / lead time MTTR (mean

    time to resolution) MTBF (mean time between failures) Application crash rates Issue Open / Close rates Release cycle time Conversion rate (think of page view -> registration) A very small sample that are not targeted toward anything specific
  7. Summary There are 2 types of metrics Vanity Actionable Let’s

    care less about the vanity metrics and more about the actionable metrics! Continued use of vanity metrics is bad for both developers AND the health of an organisation!