Come up with a metric and someone will try to game it - By outright lying - By collusion (e.g., the classic dev / QA agreement where someone makes bugs, someo

Come up with a metric and someone will try to game it - By outright lying - By collusion (e.g., the classic dev / QA agreement where someone makes bugs, someone finds them, and someone quickly fixes them, or by not reporting bugs through the bug system so they remain under the radar) - Tweaking the code to meet the metric but not the spirit (adding many do-nothing layers to a system to artificially puff up code coverage percentage is a classic) - Staging checkins (break a check-in into many sub-checkins, to appear more productive in the "check-in count" graph) Also: Schedule padding (probably since the first construction contract, thousands of years ago), secretly trimming features or leaving them as demoware, renaming bugs as unfinished features (to be completed in "version 1.1"). The list is as old as organized work.