This is a lesson more managers need to learn. You don't give engineers a metric to game, they'll run circles around your silly numbers.
My favourite anecdote about this:
I was a consultant for a multinational corp. The Natives had their bonus targets tied to "amount of open bugs at $date".
What did they do? At $date-1 the natives assigned all their open issues to me, a poor lonely consultant - who was outside of the bonus structure.
...and at $date+1 they grabbed their issues back, bonus objectives met :D
This is a lesson more managers need to learn. You don't give engineers a metric to game, they'll run circles around your silly numbers.
My favourite anecdote about this:
I was a consultant for a multinational corp. The Natives had their bonus targets tied to "amount of open bugs at $date".
What did they do? At $date-1 the natives assigned all their open issues to me, a poor lonely consultant - who was outside of the bonus structure.
...and at $date+1 they grabbed their issues back, bonus objectives met :D