> And so far no one has found a metric to measure ... writing software
How about ...
* Number of new features delivered per week (and size of said features)
* Number of new users per week
* Number of page views per day
They're fuzzy metrics at best, but saying "writing software can't be measured" is just defeatism. It's not fine art, it's not a Jackson Pollock painting, it's a craft. It has utility. We can get a grasp on that. Even the pretty bits are ultimately there to make it more useful to people.
That's even more nebulous. Yes, those things are perfectly measurable, but how do you translate x number of new users per week into code?
Isn't that what software development is all about. It's about collapsing this cloud of uncertainty into concrete deterministic expression a.k.a code, which only solves the problem as you understand it.
If software development were that measurable, software developers would be as well paid as CEOs or sales people. But we are not. Because there is no way to demonstrate almost any relationship between what we do on daily basis (stare at screen and type on the keyboard as management often sees it) and sales and revenue. Some places go as far as to think of their development organization as overhead, a cost center.
How about ...
* Number of new features delivered per week (and size of said features)
* Number of new users per week
* Number of page views per day
They're fuzzy metrics at best, but saying "writing software can't be measured" is just defeatism. It's not fine art, it's not a Jackson Pollock painting, it's a craft. It has utility. We can get a grasp on that. Even the pretty bits are ultimately there to make it more useful to people.