WARNING Some spoilers in the rant ahead. If you don’t want to know anything about Doctor Who, what are you reading this for anyway? Over the last 6 or 7 months, I’ve been spending some quality time with the older two Grumpy Metal Kids watching (and for me, re-watching) Doctor Who. Over the years, we have chosen a series of some sort to work our way through, watching an episode before bed, after chores and various forms of bodily cleansing are complete.

There’s an old saying in the building trade (a trade that I’m utterly unfamiliar with, whose work often approximates black magic to this Grumpy Metal Guy) - Measure twice, cut once. The further into my professional career I get, the more I’m convinced that this applies not just to physical tasks, but software related tasks as well. In software terms, this saying is (roughly) translated to Quantify Everything. Statistics are the best tool in our arsenal to determine how well something is performing, how efficient our people and processes are, and how to compare two things in a non-subjective sense.