For the purposes of understanding the way people act, it is important to focus on what they believe to be the truth, not what the truth is. Software developmen

For the purposes of understanding the way people act, it is important to focus on what they believe to be the truth, not what the truth is. Software development is incredibly opaque by default (heck, even we don't know how far along we are, most of the time) so anything that improves that will be perceived as improved productivity. But even if it's not, sometimes progress reporting (however rough) is needed to synchronise with other parts of the organisation. It just needs to be put into a form that is useful (e.g. for agile projects "percent of plan delivered" is not a useful metric) and how it's going to be used should be explained to those producing it. Heck, optimal is if the people making software and the people they need to coordinate with can get together and jointly agree on what type of reporting is actually meaningful for both parties. Almost always, we're discussing vanity metrics though.