Dear Monks,

I've been thinking about this one for a few days, mostly because I've moved from a systems admin-centric role into a more pure development role. I'm trying to find a way to baseline and measure my output/performance while focusing on quality as the critical component. This is really for personal enrichment, but if its useful to others then great.

This is a general dev question of course, but since most of my development is in perl, I thought it relevant to my favourite bunch of perlheads :)

What metrics does one use to measure a programmers 'quality' or 'kwalitee' of output ? I can envisage a series of normalized metrics, each of which has to reach a minimum passing value, and then a weighted mean of them all would constitute a 'grade'.

Things I'm thinking are :

• number of defects opened against your code over time
• numbers of defects closed over time
• number of lines of code added per defect fixed
• number of lines of code *removed* per defect
• number of lines of code made into reusable modules
• average 'time to fix'
• number of unit tests written per subroutine
• ...

I'm referring here of course to internal company code, and not CPAN code, which has its own well developed standards as I understand it.

How these all hang together I'm really not sure yet. Thus, I open it to the floor for discussion :)

Thanks for your time and consideration.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.