The idea is to encourage the best behavior.  A bad measurement encourages developers to focus on the measurement instead of the real problem, and in this respect it is <i>worse</i> than nothing at all.<p>A shorter function is a great side effect but it should never be the <i>point</i>.  I want someone who can do things like: find obsolete code, create a better algorithm, decides on a better language for the task.  If I say that a system is bad because it&#x27;s 200,000 lines, I may discover that developers are really good at removing comments and obfuscating code to &quot;improve&quot; it down to 150,000 lines.  If I come up with specific performance improvements, and state clear expectations such as &quot;find functions we never use&quot;, I end up with a more maintainable system.