Big Consulting Company calls up Big Oil Company. “Hey, do you guys need help being more productive developing software?”

Big Oil Company says, “Yeah, sure, whatever, we’ll buy anything,” and they buy a $1M software productivity consulting deal.

The consulting company comes on site, measures a bunch of bogus things like Lines of Code Per Developer, or, if they’re really fancy shmancy, Number of Function Points Per Programmer Per Day. Then they tell the oil company, “Gosh, you’re only getting 73.844% productivity. Pay us another $2M and we’ll double your productivity.”

Oil company pays the $2m.

Consulting company comes in, gets all the programmers in a room, tells them all about Function Points and stuff, and how productivity is REALLY IMPORTANT.

Programmers remember that scene from Office Space where Bob and Bob, the consultants, recommended all the people to get fired.

Programmers start writing a heck of a lot more function points. For example you can triple the number of function points in your code simply by round tripping everything through an XML file. Big waste of time, prone to bugs, does nothing, but each file you touch adds a function point. W00t!

Consulting company comes back, measures again, and lo and behold, with all the round trips through XML the function point count is up drastically. Consultant announces that Oil Company is now at 151.29% productivity. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

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