Comments by "Andrea Laforgia" (@andrealaforgia) on "Agile u0026 Scrum Don't Work | Allen Holub In The Engineering Room Ep. 9" video.

@RFalhar The fact that metrics can easily become a surrogate for the value that they are supposed to measure is well known in business psychology. It has a name, it's called.... "surrogation". Look it up. Its natural consequence is Goodhart's Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Harvard Business Review has published a good article "Don't let metrics undermine your business" and you can find many others along the same lines being published over the last 10-20 years. I have recently engaged in a fierce discussion with the creators of Pluralsight Flow to expose all the flaws in their product, which is going to be a boon for micromanagers who - as Allen says - "want what they can measure". It's not about opinions. Our industry has known the dangers of output-driven vs. outcome-driven for many years now.
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@RFalhar >I would be interested in seeing Allan talk about research on surrogacy, instead of using his personal opinion and experiences, which can easily be biased. Why? We all refer to our professional experience all the time. It's the data we have. When our data reflect the research on surrogacy, I don't see the problem.
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@RFalhar Research around metrics and surrogacy prove him right.
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@tonytheprogrammer1716 >The abuse generally comes about due to some ignorance regarding what is the important underlying phenomena we are trying to observe. That's a trivialization of the problem. It's not just ignorance. Weaponization of metrics happens all the time in business, even in good faith. It's just a dangerous consequence of using a dangerous tool. Are metrics useful? Absolutely yes. Are they easily weaponizable? Absolutely yes. Are they weaponized all the time? Absolutely yes.
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There is a well-known phenomenon called "surrogation". Psychologists have been writing about it for years.
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