Another problem perceived by our study participants is that measures can be gamed so that any automatic system aimed at measuring productivity would be potentially exploitable. This applies in particular to simple measures such as the number of issues or number of commits: “A poor-quality developer may be able to close more tickets than anyone else, but a high-quality developer often closes fewer tickets but of those few, almost none get reopened or result in regressions. For these reasons, metrics should seek to track quality as much as they track quantity.”
