Today on the Yahoo XP list, Kent Beck posted this link to Agitar’s open quality initiative. I applaud their openness, and would definitely encourage all other development groups to follow suit. (There’s a small danger, of course, that publication of such “dashboards” can be manipulated for the purposes of chest-thumping. I’m sure that isn’t the case with Agitar.)

It seems to me that the mere act of putting together the dashboard publication scheme would provide a group with important insights and impetus. And being able to “compare” numbers across the community offers both security (“Phew! most teams are as bad at UI testing as us”) and challenges (“Blimey, most folks test over 95% of their classes”). Perhaps every group that publishes a dashboard page should make it easy to Google – maybe we could agree on standard phrases to include on the page…? (with a link from the C2 wiki to the Google search, so that the standard is enshrined in a working implementation)

Update, 10 nov 05
Agitar’s Mark DeVisser has commented on this post.