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    What gets measured gets attention

    • Monday, Feb 24, 2020
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    Measuring is at the heart of good DevOps practice. I know, it may feel weird to actively collect and think about data, but it’s really indispensable.

    However, despite measurements feeling like a technical topic, I want to write about the human aspects at their core.

    The first is this: “What gets measured gets attention”. On the face of it, that’s a great thing. You care about some aspect of your development effort – find ways to measure it, and publicise your measurements.

    Just like that, people will start paying attention to this aspect. Maybe because they care about it themselves, and you’ve given them a way to evaluate their progress (that would be great!). Or because they know you care about it, and they want to please you. Or because they’re afraid of missing the mark and suffering negative consequences (that would be… less great).

    This is just how people are.

    However, you’re coming up on the second aspect, known as Goodhart’s Law, commonly quoted as:

    “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

    This is also just how people are: all metrics can be gamed, all metrics will be gamed.

    And not even necessarily with malicious intent. Maybe they want to make you happy, so they use a little trick to make the numbers so you like them. Maybe they’re not even aware of it, and are doing this to make themselves happy.

    And, even worse, it may not be a single person doing the gaming: it might be the organisation as a whole. Unknowingly, entire departments may be conspiring to nudge a metric in the right direction – improving a single aspect, but making the whole worse.

    So how can you protect yourself against Goodhart’s law?

    By not taking your metrics too seriously, for instance. Be aware of these mechanisms, remind others of them. They’ll still be gamed, but just by being mindful of this fact, you can take that into account.

    There’s also another neat technique – but I’ll save that one for tomorrow.