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The software engineering community has been placing a great deal of emphasis lately on metrics and their use in software development. The following metrics are probably among the most valuable for a software project:

The Pizza Metric

	How:	Count the number of pizza boxes in the lab. 
	What:	Measures the amount of schedule under-estimation. 
		If people are spending enough after-hours time 
		working on the project that they need to have 
		meals delivered to the office, then there has 
		obviously been a mis-estimation somewhere. 

The Aspirin Metric

	How:	Maintain a centrally-located aspirin bottle for use 
		by the team.  At the beginning and end of each month, 
		count the number of aspirin remaining aspirin in the  
		bottle. 
	What:	Measures stress suffered by the team during the project. 
		This most likely indicates poor project design in the 
		early phases, which causes over-expenditure of effort 
		later on.  In the early phases, high aspirin-usage 
		probably indicates that the product's goals or other 
		parameters were poorly defined. 

The Beer Metric

	How:	Invite the team to a beer bash each Friday.  Record the 
		total bar bill. 
	What:	Closely related to the Aspirin Metric, the Beer Metric 
		measures the frustration level of the team.  Among  
		other things, this may indicate that the technical  
		challenge is more difficult than anticipated. 

The Creeping Feature Metric

	How:	Count the number of features added to the project after 
		the design has been signed off, but that were not requested 
		by any requirements definition. 
	What:	This measures schedule slack.  If the team has time to add 
		features that are not necessary, then there was too much  
		time allocated to a schedule task. 

The "Duck!" Metric

	How:	This one is tricky, but a likely metric would be to 
		count the number of engineers that leave the room when 
		a marketing person enters.  This is only valid after a 
		requirements document has been finalized. 
	What:	Measures the completeness of the initial requirements. 
		If too many requirements changes are made after the product  
		has been designed, then the engineering team will be wary 
		of marketing, for fear of receiving yet another change to 
		a design which met all initial specifications. 

The Status Report Metric

	How:	Count the total number of words dedicated to the project 
		in each engineer's status report. 
	What:	This is a simple way to estimate the smoothness with which 
		the project is running.  If things are going well, an item 
		will likely read, "I talked to Fred; the widgets are on  
		schedule."  If things are not going as well, it will say, 
		"I finally got in touch with Fred after talking to his 
		phone mail for nine days straight.  It appears that the 
		widgets will be delayed due to snow in the Ozarks, which 
		will cause the whoozits schedule to be put on hold until 
		widgets arrive.  If the whoozits schedule slips by 
		three weeks, then the entire project is in danger of 
		missing the July deadline." 

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