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I would say, it is impossible to measure all of what
we do. At one extreme, you have fiction writers. Try
measuring that. We are not at that extreme, but
elements of subjective taste do apply. For example, do
we use "page intentionally left blank," have headers
and footers on a blank page, or have the page
completely blank; is any one absolutely correct?
No. We can measure trends, such as a decrease in
support calls, reduced time to ship documentation,
etc. But all of what we do cannot be measured, for
there is more art in our craft than there be in the
tasks of pure programmers and pure engineers.
--- David Neeley <dbneeley -at- oddpost -dot- com> wrote:
>
> The bulk of the comments in this thread have been
> quite interesting, but in general they seem to
> ignore one issue: quality. In my opinion, so long as
> we do not work with metrics to measure output
> quality, we cannot begin to claim we are
> "information engineers" (to borrow a term from
> another recent thread!).
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