• Goodhart?s Law, Much?

    From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Wednesday, July 15, 2026 23:41:47
    This article <https://www.infoworld.com/article/4195756/from-story-points-to-tokenmaxxing-why-engineering-keeps-measuring-the-wrong-things.html>
    has a valid point about why quality measurements keep failing to
    improve quality. But he seems unaware of the fundamental reason why:
    it?s down to Goodhart?s Law, which states ?when a metric becomes a
    target, it ceases to be a good metric?.

    Measuring something about your process is useful, as long as your
    personnel have no incentive to try to game the measurement. As soon as
    that happens, the measurement becomes worthless.

    So all those quality measurements started out looking like the right
    thing; they only became the wrong thing after the staff became aware
    of how they were being measured, and were given the incentive to try
    to make the measurement look better. And of course they would do this
    with the minimum work necessary, which meant not actually improving
    the quality of the overall business process.

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