Software Measurement is a tricky business. When we all agree on what the thing we are trying to count is, like pieces of candy in a jar, it is simple. Sadly, software isn’t candy in a jar.
We try to count things like bugs, or lines of code, of number of stories completed in a sprint but never agree on what any of those things are in the first place. I have been in trouble more than once in my role as a tester from having my performance judged based on number of bugs I reported in a sprint, or the number of test cases written for a release.
Metrics can be dangerous, but we can also use them to build a more complete story about our software.
Let’s take a look at how metrics and APIs can go together.