Comparison
Goodhart's lawvsMetric definition
Goodhart's law
the team was measured on tickets closed, and the tickets got smaller.
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.
Full entry →Metric definition
two dashboards show different revenue because one includes refunds and neither of them says so anywhere.
The precise, written statement of how a business measure is computed, including what is excluded. Most metric disagreements are not disputes about a number but discoveries that two people were computing different things, and the definition is what makes that discoverable in seconds. It has to live where it is executed rather than in a wiki, otherwise the wiki becomes the aspirational version.
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