REReasonable Engineering
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SPECIMEN No. 037 · Measurement faith

Metrics

Numbers chosen to describe whether things are going well, until they become the thing everyone works on instead.

📈 Proliferating
🏠 Habitat
Quarterly planning decks
🦈 Natural predator
Goodhart's law
🤒 Common symptom
Twelve dashboards, one opinion each

THE DEBATE

The room is split

If the whole team walked into the review, who would reach for Metrics, and who would push back.

💖 Manage by the number
🛑 Beware the number

💖 Manage by the number

PatThe Enterprise Adult“The board already looks at certain numbers; engineering needs ones it can put next to them.”
MayaThe Visionary“Velocity on slide 4 is how engineering earns credit, headcount and patience.”
AlexThe Architect“A metric with a hard line is the only standard that survives the next deadline.”

🛑 Beware the number

JoThe Cowboy“If a useless test satisfies the metric, the metric was the problem, not the test.”
NoraThe User Advocate“A bot that grades its own resolutions will always be excellent; ask the customer instead.”
RuthThe Maintainer“The leaderboard counts where the work ended, not where it was done.”

FIELD REPORTS

Stories about Metrics

TAKES

Everyone's take on it

All takes →