Re: To be taken with a grain of salt
Oh God! I'd forgotten about code rates. We had Software and Deliverable LOC measures. They were the bane of my life when I managed development projects. The company had mythical Line of Code rates. The engineers estimated how many Lines of Code a project would need and then these two very unreliable numbers were compared every month and I had to explain to the board why we were behind (we were never, ever, in front). The correct answer - "because the rate and the estimate were miles out" - would not have been an acceptable explanation. The LoC rates were set in stone and weren't allowed to change even when no project ever hit them.
Even worse was when the question was posed early on in the project. The answer "because we haven't finished design yet, so we haven't started coding yet" resulted in an even dumber measure. Someone decided that we could track the design stage by counting all the parsed customer requirements and then measuring how many we had "designed" each month based on a straight line vs time "development rate". The answer to why we were behind - "because we spend more time counting requirements than designing for them" was also not acceptable.
I'm so glad i don't have to do that any more, but I come out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
