On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 9:35 PM, Ray Lee [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Rafael J. Wysocki [off-list ref] wrote:
 >  > Finger-pointing, in these extreme cases, gives incentive to improve
 >  > quality.  It's a positive thing.
 >
 >  Sorry, but I have to disagree.  Negative finger-pointing is never a good thing.

 Correct, but let's be careful here. The original suggestion was,
 effectively, to get better metrics on the quality of contributions.
 Those metrics *could* be used for finger pointing, or (my preference)
 they could be used to direct and allocate our scarce resources: code
 reviews and mentoring.

Exactly!

 There's no way to know what the metrics will tell us until we have
 them. Arguing against metrics because they *may* be used to point
 fingers at people is a silly argument; anything can be subverted to do
 that.

Thank you, that should have been said before, you worded it perfectly.

 Let's get some measurements and see what they say. In the meantime,
 try to believe that they could be put to good purposes, such as
 identifying code areas that are tricky for contributors to get right
 (independent of contributor), or contributors that could benefit from
 code reviews, etc.

This especially is an area that I plan to focus on and should be very
reliable when finished. As can be read in my application, I plan to
look at how often a piece of code is changed, in what timespan and by
how many different authors.

Thanks for the reply!

Cheers,

Sverre