Measurements are only useful if:
- The team developed them
- The team agreed to them
- They are being used to identify a specific area
In general, any metric that doesn't fit into that will suffer from the team optimizing to it. You want to measure lines of code? By gosh, watch how many they can write! You want to measure code coverage, by golly, watch me cover that code!
I think metrics can be useful for identifying trends, and in fact, I've seen some useful ones, such as plotting when the build breaks, code churn (number of lines of code changing throughout the project) and other things. But if the team isn't coming up with them, or they don't agree or understand them, you are likely in a world of hurt.
