Hugo Slabbert ⚠️Jun 20, 2025

@donaldball @norootcause It still boggles my mind that up until a few years ago I also only ever knew "If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it," railed against it, and then finally found the full quote stating exactly the opposite.

Once more for the people in the back:

It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.

Show threadtony 🏳️‍⚧️ 🏴 🚴🧗🏻Jun 20, 2025

@hugo @donaldball @norootcause I was curious about this so I went and found a longer explanation: https://deming.org/myth-if-you-cant-measure-it-you-cant-manage-it/

I had no idea that was essentially a misquote

Myth: If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It - The W. Edwards Deming Institute

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth." - W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics. One of the quotes you will see quite frequently "incorrectly" attributed to Dr. Deming…

The W. Edwards Deming Institute
Show threadThe Long Tail
@autonomousapps @hugo @donaldball @norootcause I presented about this numerous times in the 2010s "The Dark Side of Metrics".
The OG quote, that Deming was disagreeing with, was Lord Kelvin, who said "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, **your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind**; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
Jun 20, 2025 at 8:58amWeb
Show threadThe Long TailJun 20, 2025
@autonomousapps @hugo @donaldball @norootcause Tom DeMarco, author of 'Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation', 1982, famously said in the first line of the book: "You can’t control what you can’t measure".
In 2009, nearly forty years later, he admits he was wrong. In an article in the journal IEEE Software entitled "Software engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?" DeMarco recanted, saying "In
my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no."
https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/172/resources/demarco-on-se.pdf
Show threadStuart MarksJun 20, 2025

@sleepyfox @autonomousapps @hugo @donaldball @norootcause Good stuff.

Related: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart’s Law)

Show threadThe Long TailJun 20, 2025
@stuartmarks @autonomousapps @hugo @donaldball @norootcause Another of my favourite quotes.