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I haven't created a set of metrics for a long time, but...
There are many things in high-tech environments which lend themselves well to discrete measurements. Documentation quality is not one of those things. It must be measured indirectly by response from readers, and in the case of every company I have worked for, responses are very few and far between.
Quality in a document has to do with completeness and clarity---the first is a no-brainer, since it shouldn't be going out incomplete, and the second is purely subjective on the part of the reader. When I was a pubs manager many years ago I set up two metrics, one positive and one negative. Positive was customer compliments,
negative was customer complaints. This was part of a companywide exercise. Neither category had any entries for the 2 years I was manager. You would have to expend a lot of effort to get more information than that.
write now wrote:
> The powers that be have determined that we will now provide quality metrics every month. I've read over several past threads and searched the Web, but didn't find exactly what I'm looking for. Everything posted seems to concentrate on the postive and negative aspects of metrics, where I'm looking for specific measurements.
>
> If your group does quality metrics, what exactly do you measure? I'm trying to find some relatively significant measurements that won't take me a month to compile.
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