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.