CK's Musings: Which project metrics do you use?

My favourite software project metrics:

The main two that I use at a high level are end to end cycle time, and benefit hit rate.

End to End Cycle Time: the length of time from the conceptualisation of an idea, or feature to the reliable use of that feature by the end customers.
ROI cycle time: The length of time from conceptualisation of a feature to when the feature pays for itself, expressed as a rolling average
Benefit Hit Rate: As a percentage, how many of the features that start being developed go on to return more to the business than they cost.
Overhead: Number of man days not spent producing the product, ie waiting for a build, waiting for a release, merging branches, waiting for broken builds, waiting for test runs to complete, waiting for hardware, attending meetings etc

Commit cycle time: Length of time that it takes a developer from completing a feature to receiving confirmation that it has been accepted.
Defect rate: Number of defects per feature that was accepted as complete, expressed as a rolling average or over a period of time.
Build time: Length of time that it takes to run the build
Commit test execution time: How long it takes to run the commit tests
Acceptance test execution time: How long it takes to run the acceptance tests
Automated test quality: When a test fails, is the fix to the system code or to the test? Represented as a percentage: num fixes to system code/num failed tests

Use case duration: How long does it take an average user to perform a single goal
Use case step count: The number of user actions required to attain their goal
User frustration: Number of user mistakes + number of system errors*10
UI Responsiveness: Length of time from a user click and a system reponse

Uptime: The length of that the system has been up without a user visible outage
Call out count: Number of times that a 'fatal' error has occurred requiring immediate support staff to take action, even if in the middle of the night
Error count: The number of errors reported in the log files
Warning count: The number of warning messages reported in the log files
Support overhead: Number of man hours required to keep the lights on
Release duration: How long does it take to perform a release, in man hours

Unit test coverage: Percentage of lines of code tested by the unit tests
Acceptance test coverage: Percentage of lines of code tested by the acceptance tests
Average class Cyclometric Complexity: Indicator of code complexity, the higher the value the more complex the code base is to understand
Worst method Cyclometric Complexity: Indicator of code complexity, the higher the value the more complex the code base is to understand

CK's Musings