I stumbled upon the book "The Machine that Changed the World" about Toyota's Lean Engineering Processes. A comparison has been made between auto manufacturing processes and software engineering and there are now movements in lean software engineering.
I thought auto makers still did it the way Henry Ford did it. Turns out in the 1950s, Toyota revolutionized the whole thing. They were able to come out with cars 3 years before their competition and $2000 cheaper!
There is a lesson here for the software community. We need to embrace agile or lean thinking or our discipline will become staid. I think there's a human tendency to always move on to the next best thing. Work on one thing, do a good job and move on to the next. However, people don't stick around and make sure that 'good thing' is actually good. Is it being executed on a daily basis or according to plan? Maybe it needs course corrections.
I'm jumbling a lot of things in this one post so excuse the rambling. I'll sort it all out at some point.
Ideas for metrics:
1) # of unit tests written? are they growing as software is growing? Are they being executed in the nightly batch? <- refers more to adoption of TDD
2) Are we able to auto-generate documentation? [ I'm not familiar with what's out there but if we go agile and give precedence to writing code, a tool like this may satisfy those documentation hounds ]
