This is an awesome, excellent and scientific understanding of process quality control. This is essentially [Deming's 11th point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W

This is an awesome, excellent and scientific understanding of process quality control. This is essentially [Deming's 11th point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle...) applied to software. Deming warned of using numeric goals or quotas, since the target of the simplistic quota or numeric target will affect the output of the very thing you're trying to measure. This is not to say that numeric measurement is not useful—quite to the contrary. Statistics are an extremely useful tool to understand your process. But using them as a target of performance is where you draw the line, since that is when they begin to affect the quality itself. That was exactly the point of twpayne's post, and it's a nuanced and constructive argument.