I work in an organisation where some domains we think are doing OK. They are CD, YBIYRI, product teams delivering to production in some instances multiple times a day.
In other domains they have not really even started on that journey. They are projects not products and follow a more siloed, phased, document heavy way of working.
We have a mandate to help these other domains on their journey to CD.
We do however want to be sure we are safe to scale. We traditionally have only used trailing metrics (e.g. DORA) which tell us how we DID. We have a gut feel that as we scale we may need metrics that are more leading (e.g. measuring engineering signals like code complexity or, dare I say it, code coverage) which tell us how we ARE DOING.
We think we are aware of the usual gotchas in measurement and so our measurement principles include things like: don't measure individuals but teams, don't set arbitrary targets, don't use metrics to judge across teams but to help each team have better evidence-based discussions, etc.
Bit of a huge / unfair question, but what is your view of initiatives that try to introduce metrics, what pitfalls have you seen (other than the above) and have you seen these been successful & valuable?
Ultimately one of our motivations is to have the ability to spot correlation patterns in our organisation between great outcomes (trailing metrics) and great engineering practices (leading metrics). Is this a fools errand?