dotProject

I'm often amused at the store people put in statistics. Forum post counts, bug counts, code commits, even lines of code are often touted as being indicative of some worth. The trouble is they are all very misleading. And what does it mean anyway?

Recently over at the dotProject forums we made a few changes. Probably the most important one, and one that is already having benefits is to search for posts matching a new posts subject matter. Why has this been of benefit? When a new user comes to the forums, they want to get their questions answered and if they don't see a similar thread in the index page for a forum, they post their question without searching further. When they do this the forum supporters need to respond to this in some way, upping their post count in the meantime even if it is just to point them to a similar post.

Now when a user posts, they get a list of similar threads. We are already seeing people looking at those threads before they post, reducing the number of times we have to answer the same question. Our post counts are not being boosted by one-liner 'have you looked at this thread' answers, but by the same token users are getting a better service and we now have the time to answer truly new questions and the much more important task of working on the code.

It is much the same with other statistics like code commits. Sure, I have one of those widgets that tell people how many commits I've done, but does it really mean anything? Not much. If I wanted to I could boost that by committing one file at a time, rather than a bunch of files in a related commit, something I have seen done in other projects. It also doesn't really measure why the commits were made. If I made a commit and realised that I'd screwed up and then committed the correct fix then I look better on raw numbers than if I'd got it right in the first place.

The worth of a programmer is something that is hard to quantify, but I guess it comes down to how your peers perceive you. After all, if you find that your peers enjoy working with you and respect you, what does it matter what some nefarious statistics show?

The worth of a non-programmer in a project (and lets face it, it takes much more than good code to make a good project) is even harder to quantify as currently there is very little in the way of statistics to even identify them as valuable member of the team. Again, it comes down to your peers. Not to a dodgy number.