A good tool is only as effective as the person wielding the tool, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have good tools. Put an artist’s paintbrush in the wrong hands, and you’ll get bad art, but every good artist — even great — will use a paintbrush when appropriate.

Please reread the post. My position is that metrics are a tool that when used intelligently is essential for improving. In fact, you don’t really know whether you’ve improved or not unless you have some measure. Part of the problem is that teams that collect metrics don’t collect the right ones and even if they do collect the right ones, they only collect them; they often don’t use them. I plan to present a suite of metrics that aide in specific areas and how to use them.

I too have worked on projects that have succeeded without the use of metrics. Metrics bring repeatability and control to the development life-cycle (you can repeat your successes because you know what contributed to them) as they aide decision making. Now people make all sorts of bad decisions from good information. When that happens, you either have the wrong people running your project, or they just need to grow.

What evidence do you have that by collecting metrics I will achieve these goals?

I’ve been on plenty of projects that both succeeded and failed and collecting metrics was not a leading indicator of success.