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Stephen Frein

Comcast

Stephen Frein is a software development manager at Comcast, where his team creates tools for process automation and quality assurance. As an adjunct professor at Drexel University, he delivers soporific lectures on database development and IT management. Stephen has been leading development teams for fifteen years, and occasionally does it well, mostly by dint of accidents he cannot reliably replicate. He has presented at previous conferences by sneaking into unused rooms and deceiving the unsuspecting. Stephen enjoys polluting the hive mind via frein.com and writing vapid, self-deprecating bios.

Speaker Presentations
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am
Metrics
Non-Pathological Software Metrics

As semi-scientific software professionals, we like the idea of measuring our work. In some cases, our bosses like the idea much more than we do. Yet, meaningful software development metrics are notoriously challenging to define, and many people have given up trying because metrics often incentivize pathological behaviors. Since you get what you measure, most metrics lead development teams to optimize numeric proxies for success rather than the goals these proxies were intended to represent.