Ever had a an inspiration for a really neat metric or measure to apply to software development? One that would shed the light of truth into the murky depths of a project? One that you really wish you'd done on your last project? One that, in practice, is unrealistic to obtain? Share it!
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Development Friction = MTBF / System Startup Time

The idea being that either a low Mean Time Between Failure or a high system startup time lead to a frustrating development experience. This measure would have been interesting to compute for several projects I've been involved with. (Never mind that MTBF is wickedly hard to calculate for complex systems.) During the course of development, startup time often grows until a conscious effort is made to force it back down. MTBF depends on a lot of things, but often tracks to how close to the edge the development team is operating (that itself is sloppy thing to quantify). --DaveSmith
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