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Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:35:12 -0700
From: "Ray Lee" <ray-lk@madrabbit.org>
To: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>
Subject: Re: Reporting bugs and bisection
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On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl> wrote:
>  > Finger-pointing, in these extreme cases, gives incentive to improve
>  > quality.  It's a positive thing.
>
>  Sorry, but I have to disagree.  Negative finger-pointing is never a good thing.

Correct, but let's be careful here. The original suggestion was,
effectively, to get better metrics on the quality of contributions.
Those metrics *could* be used for finger pointing, or (my preference)
they could be used to direct and allocate our scarce resources: code
reviews and mentoring.

There's no way to know what the metrics will tell us until we have
them. Arguing against metrics because they *may* be used to point
fingers at people is a silly argument; anything can be subverted to do
that.

Let's get some measurements and see what they say. In the meantime,
try to believe that they could be put to good purposes, such as
identifying code areas that are tricky for contributors to get right
(independent of contributor), or contributors that could benefit from
code reviews, etc.