Comment by ajmurmann

We all know Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Quantitive measure done't work well and especially not for something as complex as software development. They might tell you were to look more closely at best. Qualitative assessments work much better, but those require trust. As soon as going gets tough for a company or department, trust weakens, doubt increases and higher management, especially if they don't understand software dev well, will require quantitive metrics. It's bad, but we'll never get rid of the mess because of organizational dynamics.