From hidden links to view unwanted pages and ads to fake subscription plans that would lure you to pay for useless services comes a world full of employees who think numbers only matter where they are following the bad habit of doing whatever it takes just to make the sheets full even if things will be worse in the future. In these situations Goodhart’s law comes in hand.

The law was originally stated by Charles Goodhart as a way to criticize the government in his country for how it observe the monetary policy on the basis of targets which later have been used out of econonmy in the format below.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure — Goodhart’s Law.

Following metrics for the sake of it is not a good thing and that is the obvious thing to any sane person and the Goodhart’s law declares that directly.

A good example for Goodhart’s law would be the customer service call center focusing on the number of calls an agent make instead of the quality of the service allowing agents to close the calls faster than before without caring if the service was provided in the right way.

Since the law can be used in a broad way, let’s apply it to some issues we can see in the software development world.

It’s always hard to put a way to measure individuals’ performance specially in software development where people mostly work in silence and their work is not visible to the public though with modern tools we have some news ways like how many line o