First of all let me thank you for keeping this conversation/debate open and useful by demonstrating good faith by actually experimenting with one of the metrics in questions before expressing an opinion. What a concept :-).
I will try to follow your good example and REALLY try to understand your position better. To keep things simple, I am going to focus on a specific metric (I will use CRAP since we recently discussed it and we've both using it on our code) but the concepts should apply to most other software metrics.
Your argument - and please correct me if I paraphrase it incorrectly - is that metrics such as CRAP oversimplify to such an extent that the metric number by itself carries no actionable information at the 'manager level'. Since it takes a developer to go and look at the details before deciding if any justifiable action should be taken, the metric should not be reported above the developer level.
If that's the case, I believe we are more in agreement than you think. I agree that a metric such as CRAP is much more useful to, and actionable by, developers than managers. CRAP is actually meant to be used primarily by developers (hence the IDE plug-in). I also agree that, in mapping the code into a single digit there is an unavoidable loss of information. But I don't agree that such a number does not provide any useful information to a manager. As a matter of fact, I don't think you believe something that black-and-white (i.e. that it's completely useless) either, because you say:
>...but the fact is that the original metric >is just a flag...
I think I see an opportunity for reaching some sort of agreement because a 'flag' is not completely useless. I need to do some a lot more thinking about it, but I am willing to explore the possibility that metric may be too strong a word for most things we call metrics. Perhaps they are just flags; warning signs, binary indicators that something is potentially wrong and that someone should go take a closer look.
Are we moving closer Vincent?
Alberto
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