No, it's even worse. You can't manage what you can't measure. And so far no one has found a metric to measure creative output like painting, writing poetry or writing software. Whatever metric you choose to measure and evaluate your team, and esp. what ever metric you reward is going to lead your team optimizing their performance for that metric.
You want to measure LOC, programmers WILL write more lines. Want to measure and reward less defects, programmers WILL create less defects etc. But will your software be sexy, appealing to users, creative, innovative, trend setting solution to old/new problem?
> 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.
Measuring something in order to manage it does not automatically mean that the management consists of incentives or punishment - and if you don't do those things, people have no reason to game your measurements.
There most definitely are useful software metrics that can provide important information to management, mostly in the form of identifying problems and risks, which can then be adressed before they become urgent.
> how do you translate x number of new users per week into code
You talked about turning code into metrics, now you want to turn metrics into code?
It's the other way around. Scrum translates delivered code into metrics. You track history. You would say "last week we delivered 4 new features and signed up x new users. That's above our average." It's not entirely nebulous.
You want to measure LOC, programmers WILL write more lines. Want to measure and reward less defects, programmers WILL create less defects etc. But will your software be sexy, appealing to users, creative, innovative, trend setting solution to old/new problem?