Goodhart’s law—usually cited as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”—describes another risk of the use of dashboards in software development projects. For example, if a dashboard emphasizes the number of open issues, developers will become more careful about opening new issues, e.g., by combining several smaller issues into one. Similarly, if a dashboard conceptualizes productivity as time spent in the IDE, developers might become hesitant to look up information outside of the IDE.
