Bob C. Martin (Uncle Bob to you and me) suggested, in his “quintessence” keynote at the Agile2008 conference that he had the perfect metric for code quality. Cyclomatic complexity and others were interesting mostly to those who invented them, etc. His answer was brilliant, and was easily measured during code reviews:
WTFs per minute
I love it. All you need is a counter and a stop-watch. Start code-review and start watch and start clicking anytime you see code that makes you say or think “What the F???”. This dovetails nicely with his original recommendation for a new statement in the agile manifesto: “Craftsmanship over Crap”.
This reminds me of the “Scheiße metric” that I invented with our German linguists when we developed proofing tools for Microsoft in the 1990s… I think I used it to measure the morale of the team, though.