There is a development method called "Direct Development" which has arisen as a term to describe the organic programming model that many profitable APL endeavor

There is a development method called "Direct Development" which has arisen as a term to describe the organic programming model that many profitable APL endeavors have followed. It helps to eliminate the issue of metrics by eliminating the divide between the programming/IT unit and the users of the software. In companies that are using Direct Development, the metric is "are they giving me what I need?" And the way they accomplish this is by pair programming with the users of the software themselves. That's right, the users of the code actually participate directly in the development of the code. They write the code in such a way that the code itself becomes the specification analogue and is in fact the shared knowledge between the coders and the users. Not the comments, but the code itself. The users read the code, work with the programmers, and they make changes on the fly (with appropriate QA). If your users have the confidence that they can walk up and get any feature they need implemented with you, that's about the best metric of success I can think of.