In this new post to his blog Keith Casey looks at a metric he considers a true failure at measuring the success of a piece of software - lines of code.

While the obvious implication of the article is that organizations are not properly equipped/trained/prepared to tackle these large software development projects and therefore eventually fail. Especially early in my career, I tried to tackle problems and ideas that simply weren't reasonable or were considered ridiculously complex and far beyond my skills. This is a common problem on software development teams with little real-world experience or hubris in their own skills or both...

He doesn't see the Lines of Code (LOC) metric as particularly useful and backs it up with a few reasons including the overwhelming complexity of large codebases, duplication in functionality from place to place and the amount of "cruft" code that can accumulate in older, less used parts of the code.

On the Blue Parabola blog Keith Casey asks the question "how do you measure an individual's contribution?"

In the past few weeks, I've been working fast and furious at getting web2project to our v1.0 milestone. As part of that effort, I track open issues, problematic modules, community feedback via the forums, death threats via all methods, and other related aspects.

He suggests a few different ideas for measuring how much a user has contributed: lines of code, commit count, issues they've reported, number of issues closed or community involvement. Of course, none of these can truly measure how much an individual has participated in a project, especially since it could be a mix of several of them combined into a whole as the "involvement persona" of any given person.