It doesn't surprise me that your friend failed on this project but it isn't obvious a priori that measuring productivity is futile. But in my current job they'r

It doesn't surprise me that your friend failed on this project but it isn't obvious a priori that measuring productivity is futile. But in my current job they're trying to create KPIs for us, so I've thought about this a bit and can certainly recognise the difficulty. As an engineer in general how can you quantify the value of maintenance? On paper it's just a cost and it's impossible to know what would have happened without it. The worst strategy is just to measure easy things like story points or number of tasks completed because it ruins the work culture. In those cases you're not going to take time to review pull requests carefully, advise colleagues, propose new projects or work on difficult tasks. It seems impossible to measure these, at least to me.