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added Goodhart's Law on metrics

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Michal Kaptur
2019-11-07 16:59:44 +01:00
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@@ -42,6 +42,7 @@ Like this project? Please considering [Sponsoring Me](https://github.com/sponsor
* [The Spotify Model](#the-spotify-model) * [The Spotify Model](#the-spotify-model)
* [Wadler's Law](#wadlers-law) * [Wadler's Law](#wadlers-law)
* [Wheaton's Law](#wheatons-law) * [Wheaton's Law](#wheatons-law)
* [Goodhart's Law](#goodharts-law)
* [Principles](#principles) * [Principles](#principles)
* [The Dilbert Principle](#the-dilbert-principle) * [The Dilbert Principle](#the-dilbert-principle)
* [The Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule)](#the-pareto-principle-the-8020-rule) * [The Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule)](#the-pareto-principle-the-8020-rule)
@@ -423,6 +424,30 @@ See also:
Coined by Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Big Bang Theory), this simple, concise, and powerful law aims for an increase in harmony and respect within a professional organization. It can be applied when speaking with coworkers, performing code reviews, countering other points of view, critiquing, and in general, most professional interactions humans have with each other. Coined by Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Big Bang Theory), this simple, concise, and powerful law aims for an increase in harmony and respect within a professional organization. It can be applied when speaking with coworkers, performing code reviews, countering other points of view, critiquing, and in general, most professional interactions humans have with each other.
### Goodhart's Law
[The Goodhart's Law on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law)
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
>
> _Charles Goodhart_
also known as:
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
>
> _Marilyn Strathern_
The law states that the measure-driven optimizations could lead to devaluation of the measurement outcome itself. Overly selective set of measures ([KPIs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator)) blindly applied to a process results in distorted effect. People tend to optimize locally by "gaming" the system in order to satisfy particular metrics instead of paying attention to hollistic outcome of their actions.
Real-world examples:
- Assert-free tests satisfy the code coverage expectation, despite the metric intent was to create well-tested software.
- Developer performance score indicated by the number of lines committed leads to unjustifiably bloated codebase.
See also:
- [Goodhart’s Law: How Measuring The Wrong Things Drive Immoral Behaviour](https://coffeeandjunk.com/goodharts-campbells-law/)
- [Dilbert on bug-free software](https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13)
## Principles ## Principles
Principles are generally more likely to be guidelines relating to design. Principles are generally more likely to be guidelines relating to design.