Architecture & practice·Estimation and planning
the team was measured on tickets closed, and the tickets got smaller.
Goodhart's law
Also calledwhen a measure becomes a target
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It is the central risk of every engineering metric — coverage, velocity, story points, incident counts, review turnaround — because the measure is a proxy and the proxy is easier to move than the thing. It is the reason the DORA metrics are published as a diagnostic set and the reason a good metric conversation includes how it would be gamed.