Software development metrics are not worthless. They are, however, seriously misunderstood. This is partly why we built Ohloh to focus on Open Source: it's the world's largest testbed of available software development metrics.
One challenge to interpreting development metrics is having a clue about what is 'normal'. Just knowing your FOOBAZ count is X doesn't help much. Once you can compare your FOOBAZ count to 100k other developers, it may begin to give you some helpful perspective. Of course, relying on a single metric is myopic - which is why we offer comment ratio, language breakdown etc...
Btw, I agree that human opinion plays a vital role. That's why we also enable people hand out 'Kudos' to their peers - to acknowledge human judgement as well. The Kudo scores are then evaluated using a PageRank-inspired algorithm across all open source contributors.
Disclaimer: I co-founded Ohloh.
We let people 'claim' development contributions individually. So your Ohloh account can be related to as many (or as few;-) nicknames on projects as you like.
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Software development metrics are not worthless. They are, however, seriously misunderstood. This is partly why we built Ohloh to focus on Open Source: it's the world's largest testbed of available software development metrics.
One challenge to interpreting development metrics is having a clue about what is 'normal'. Just knowing your FOOBAZ count is X doesn't help much. Once you can compare your FOOBAZ count to 100k other developers, it may begin to give you some helpful perspective. Of course, relying on a single metric is myopic - which is why we offer comment ratio, language breakdown etc...
Btw, I agree that human opinion plays a vital role. That's why we also enable people hand out 'Kudos' to their peers - to acknowledge human judgement as well. The Kudo scores are then evaluated using a PageRank-inspired algorithm across all open source contributors.
Disclaimer: I co-founded Ohloh. We let people 'claim' development contributions individually. So your Ohloh account can be related to as many (or as few ;-) nicknames on projects as you like.