Popular software engineering metrics, and how they're gamed

By Bill Harding, Programmer/CEO
Published March 31, 2020. Last updated November 15, 2021

When people talk about software engineering metrics, there are two contradicting truisms one often hears:

What's measured improves.
-Peter Drucker


-Goodhart's Law

Both of these statements describe software engineering metrics in part, but taken together, they imply that it's impossible to use measurement to improve. How can a data-seeking manager reconcile this paradox?

The bad news is that it takes some commitment to learning, especially for those coming from distant (i.e., non-technical) roles. The good news is that, as of 2021, there are a growing number of well-researched software engineering metrics that can and do offer engineering insights in spite of "becoming a target."

In fact, if you use the metrics we recommend among Best Metrics and Google DORA Metrics, the more employees try to "game the system," the more the business' long-term interests are served. We'll present examples to prove this as we review each metric below.

Requirements to qualify for the "best software engineering metrics" list

Before writing this article, we analyzed the metrics proposed by the top 20 Google results in the domain of "software engineering metrics". The most common weakness of these articles was the scarcity of actionable instructions that could be followed to gain access to the metrics within one's own engineering team.

For example, almost every Google result recommends measuring "Team Velocity." But no article will specify what units "Team Velocity" should be measured in. Is it... tickets closed? Lines of code? Story points? The wisdom of relying on an ambiguous metric like "Team Velocity" depends entirely on the units underlying the measurement.

We hope to avoid these legacy articles' errors of omission, so each metric recommended among our "Best metrics," "Google DORA metrics," and "Other good metrics" will include the specific steps to follow in order to quickly get access to these metrics on your own dev team (free of charge, when available).

Specific requirements to qualify for recommendation by this article

  • Business value. Is it possible to draw a straight line from metric => business value created?
  • Measurable. Can we define a specific number and its units of measure (e.g., points, percentage), so that it can be tracked over time and correlated with events and experiments?
  • Actionable. Can it regularly inform action that leads to positive results? Preferably with minimal false positives?
  • Available/convenient. Can an average software engineering team get access to this metric without changing their existing development processes?
  • Popular/empirically proven. Does it have enough of a following to be well-documented and credible?
  • Of course, even if a metric fulfills all five of these requirements, it might still be easy for developers to game. That's why, as we review each metric below, we'll tell you what to look for so you can spot if team members engage in caustic behavior in on behalf of metric-chasing.

    Full List of Metrics

    Here is the full list of software engineering metrics that qualify under the stated criteria, as of late 2021:

    Best software engineering metrics (non-Google)

    Following are the software engineering metrics that fall in the sweet spot between "empirically validated" and "widely used," while offering the highest level of benefit to the team when developers work to optimize on behalf of the metric (i.e., the harder a developer works to game these metrics, the better a businesses long-term prospects).

    🏦 OKR-driven

    Example OKR template
    One of many example OKR templates available via Weekdone at Okrexamples.com

    Any list that's focused on maximizing business value ought to start here. Leading companies like Google use OKRs as a primary axis on which to evaluate senior engineers. The drawback of OKR-driven metrics is that they are, by definition, specific to business particulars. This makes it impossible to generalize a formula by which to capture them, or to generalize the path by which they'll get gamed.

    How to game it? The risk of OKRs being gamed is low since they are usually business-centric. The main danger of OKR-driven metrics is that since they're typically formulated on a one-off (or periodic) basis, they may be less reliable than metrics that have been vetted over years. There are always possible edge cases lurking. For example, setting an OKR to "introduce less than 10 bugs per month" could be gamed by not launching any new features. Assuming both parties are acting in good faith, OKR gaming should in practice be rare.

    How to get it? Via existing measurement dashboards, or by working with companies like Weekdone who help provide OKR inspiration.

    Line Impact

    Comparison of commit count, lines of code, and Line Impact relative to Story Points. Line Impact correlates more strongly in this data set
    Empirical research suggests that Line Impact correlates more strongly with Story Points (estimated software effort) than any conventional git metric

    Line Impact is a software metric designed to measure the extent to which a set of commits evolves its repo. This video offers an over-simplified three-minute explanation. The gist is that Line Impact cancels out all of the work-in-progress activity ("churn") that happens as a feature gets developed, leaving a concentrated embodiment of how much a set of commits evolved the repo from its starting point. Line Impact is conserved across languages, so it takes a consistent amount of time to generate Line Impact whether the developer is writing Java, Python, Javascript, or any other major programming language (30+ supported).

    In terms of business value, both Line Impact and Story Points (which tend to converge among teams with reliable effort estimation) approximate how much productive effort is being spent by developers toward advancing the project. The biggest difference between "Story Points complete" and "Line Impact" is that the former captures strictly work done to resolve issue tracker tickets that were assigned, whereas Line Impact captures work on tickets AND work done to pay down tech debt (by updating or removing legacy code). In teams that measure their progress with Line Impact, Senior Developers have strong incentive to freshen legacy code systems alongside the Jira ticket work they've been assigned.

    Because real-world software teams almost never create Jira tickets specifically to reduce their code footprint or modernize legacy systems, Line Impact is an effective means to ensure that long-term code health gets attention of the team, alongside the day-to-day work of implementing new tickets.

    How to game it? Simply put, Line Impact was designed to be gamed. The linked help page explains how Line Impact rewards developers when they implement new work that integrates into similar existing systems. In other words, if the developer reuses existing systems, doesn't copy/paste code, and consolidates similar concepts when the opportunity presents itself, their Line Impact will outpace teammates focused solely on implementing tickets by adding new code.

    The tendency of Line Impact to shadow "Story Points completed," with an emphasis on overall repo health (e.g., more tests, more documentation, more reuse) makes it a perfect companion to teams that are already measuring progress via Story Points. The more that a developer tries to "game" Line Impact, the healthier their product code becomes.

    How to get it? Line Impact is offered exclusively by GitClear. As of GitClear's v4 release in November 2021, GitClear is permanently free for hobbyist developers, while prices start at $9 per active developer for commercial use (for convenience, see a detailed comparison of pricing vs other Developer Analytics here). Note that GitClear also offers an On-premises (locally hosted) version of the product for teams that need SOC2-level security administered within their own firewall.

    🎲 Story Points Completed

    software engineering metrics: Jira burndown report
    Story Point-based "release burndown" report, available via Jira

    Story Points could lay claim to be the most "classic" of software engineering metrics. There are many different ways to calculate Story Points. Whatever method you use to estimate it, Story Points map back to a blend of "expected developer time" and "expected effort" to complete some task.

    Managers can use Story Points to calculate the costs implied by a task in order to make informed decisions in prioritizing their Jira queue. For example, if a developer earns $10k/month, and a ticket is estimated at 10 Story Points (half of month of weekdays), that implies a cost around $10,000 * 0.5 = $5,000. Using some version of that calculation helps prioritize tasks based on which yield the highest ratio of Projected Value / Projected Implementation Cost.

    How to game it? Attention should be paid to the process a team uses during their estimation process. If an unscrupulous actor can contrive reasons to give a ticket a high Story Points estimate, then they will falsely appear to have been unduly productive when that ticket ends up being implemented in a fraction of their original time estimate.

    A few simple strategies that prevent (or mitigate) Story Point estimation gaming:

    1. Use planning poker to create time estimates. Applies wisdom of the crowd to prevent a bad actor from swaying estimation.
    2. Allow developers to choose their own tickets in a "task marketplace." If the developers on a team get to self-assign tickets (e.g., in round robin fashion at the beginning of a sprint), this allows all developers comparable access to select whatever mis-estimated tickets may occur.
    3. Don't use across teams. Since every team's exact definition of Story Points differs (subtly or otherwise), comparing Story Points values from team-to-team is not advisable.

    How to get it? Most any issue tracker this side of GitHub allows specifying Story Points. In terms of viewing them, Jira provides a "next-gen velocity report" dedicated to the purpose of showing Story Points completed over time. GitClear also offers historical tracking of Story Points including calculation of the correlation between Line Impact and Story Points, which can help improve future estimation efforts during sprint retrospective. This feature is available on GitClear's free (Hobbyist) pricing plan. Jira also offers a free version for teams of 10 or fewer.

    Google DORA Devops Metrics

    Google DORA (short for "DevOps and Research and Assessment") are a set of metrics that Google has been benchmarking with real teams since 2018. This makes Google DORA stats perfect for managers who would like to get a sense for their teams' DevOps performance looks relative to other dev teams:

    As of 2021, each of Google's four recommended metrics (reviewed individually below) offer a target for teams that aim to be "Elite." We will call out those target thresholds along with reviewing the use case and applicability of each metric.

    Google DORA 2021 benchmark stats. Image fuzz courtesy of Google

    You may also find the Google DORA stats referred to as the "Accelerate stats." The "Accelerate" branding comes from annual release announcement that Google publishes, where the stats are described as "The DORA 2021 Accelerate State of Devops." Following are the four metrics Google recommends, in descending order of how much attention we believe each deserves.

    Lead Time for Changes (Deploy Cycle Time)

    Lead Time graph as visualized in GitClear Issue Stats

    Google defines "Lead Time for Changes" as

    How long does it take to go from "code committed" to "code successfully running in production?"

    This definition of Lead Time seeks to create incentive for a team to deploy their code frequently. In "Elite" teams, where Lead Time averages less than one hour, as soon as a commit is made to the trunk branch, it begins its journey down the road toward being tested and deployed.

    For a team to qualify as "Elite," it almost certainly will need to have implemented Continuous Integration ("CI") and Continuous Deployment ("CD") processes. These DevOps methods have soared in popularity since the mid-2010s, because they automate away the busywork that has traditionally been required to release new code (e.g., QA signoff, manually build and upload assets). "Elite" status also implies that the deploy process must be able to complete in less than an hour, which is clearly preferable to the alternative.

    How to game it? As mentioned above, setting up CI and CD are key to "gaming" this metric, since they negate the testing and deploy steps that leech time from low-performing teams. But that tactic isn't actually "gaming" in the sense that it produces an undesirable outcome in pursuit of over-optimization. Rather, when a team has a low Lead Time, it is an authentic, effective reflection that a team has successfully cultivated habits that rapidly allow moving code from "pushed" to "tested" to "available to customers." 🚀

    The question that an engineering leader may struggle to decide is whether the costs of setting up and maintaining a Continuous Deployment process outweighs the drawbacks? Some teams determine they don't want their average Lead Time less than an hour, for example if they want nominal human vetting of new builds, or if they want to leave the option of developers making work-in-progress commits to the main branch.

    How to get it? All four of the most popular Developer Analytics companies (GitClear, Pluralsight, Code Climate Velocity, LinearB) implement some version of Lead Time calculation, as does Jira. The challenge in getting these stats is that there are two similar-but-distinct interpretations of "Cycle Time." One is "Deploy Cycle Time," described in this section. The other is its cousin, "Pull Request Cycle Time," which is described separately below. Each stat can provide value, depending on what aspect of the development life cycle the manager is seeking to optimize.

    Time to Restore Service (also known as "Mean Time To Repair" or "MTTR")

    GitClear Mean Time to Repair (Time to Restore Service) thumbnail
    Time to Restore Service (visualization via GitClear) is the most high-variance stat among the Google DORA set

    Google defines "Time to Restore Service" as

    How long does it take to restore service when a service incident or defect that impacts users occurs (e.g., unplanned outage, or service impairment)?

    Elite teams are able to respond to critical defects within one hour, whereas "Low" teams are measured to take "More than six months" (yikes). That is to say, there is a huge amount of variation in benchmarked values of this metric, given the intrinsic differences of different release environments. That is, fixing a critical defect in the App Store generally can't happen in less than 24 hours given Apple's turnaround time to review updates.

    How to game it? This metric does not lend itself to being gamed. However, when one hopes to observe how their team's performance on this metric is changing over time, they're likely to discover extremely high variance in MTTR from incident-to-incident. In fact, this is probably the "noisiest" metric of any featured on this page, because the time to repair an issue is impacted by everything from "did the defect occur at the beginning of a weekend?" to "did the defect repair get deprioritized because support found a way to triage the problem?" Google's own benchmark values for this metric, ranging from "under an hour" to "more than six months" speaks to the noisiness that can reduce this metric's utility.

    How to get it? Time to Restore Service is offered as part of GitClear's DORA stats, as well as being offered by LinearB. There is no evidence that this stat has been implemented by Code Climate or Pluralsight Flow as yet.

    🐞 Change Failure Rate, aka "Defect Percent," "Bug Rate," "Critical Defect Frequency"

    GitClear Defect Rate Thumbnail
    What percentage of a team's releases contained a critical defect, as illustrated via GitClear DORA metrics

    Historically, there have been numerous methods proposed to capture the rate at which important bugs are being released. With this metric having been formally enshrined among the DORA stats, we now have a single, concise definition to unify teams:

    What percentage of changes to production or released to users result in degraded service? (e.g., lead to service impairment or service outage) and subsequently require remediation (e.g., require a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, patch)

    According to the the benchmarks, 0-15% of the releases made to an Elite team's product will result in the type of degraded service Google describes. Since this metric is the ratio of "critical defects" to "releases", it is necessary to measure both of these in order to calculate Change Failure Rate. An example implementation to capture both metrics is described in GitClear's DORA documentation.

    How to game it? This metric is not regularly gamed in production environments we have observed. However, one possible path by which a team could try to shape this metric to look artificially better for them: manipulate the process that designates defects as "critical." If the team itself is responsible for demarcating when a critical defect has occurred or a "service impairment" has occurred, they can make that bar so impossibly high that it will never be triggered (think AWS health dashboards, which almost never change in response to user-observed outages).

    How to get it? GitClear and LinearB both offer this stat as part of their respective Google DORA integrations, and the open source Four Keys project also offers a visualization of this metric.

    Release Frequency

    Daily Deployment frequency as visualized through Four Keys
    How often does the team release to production? This graph of the open source "Four Keys" project (link below) is one way to visualize the answer

    The most redundant and easily gamed among the Google DORA metrics, Release Frequency is described in their docs as:

    How often does your organization deploy code to production or release it to end users?

    In the context of software that ships, or otherwise has a days- or weeks-long process that must be traveled until it is delivered to customers, then this metric can provide useful signal to the team as they see the metric fluctuate over time.

    ⚠️ How to game it? For the typical web app, this metric is highly gameable. It's not difficult to set up a Continuous Deployment environment where every single commit counts as a "release." Such a team might have orders have magnitude higher values of "Release Frequency" than another team in the company that released "only" once per day. Absent service interruptions (already measured by MTTR), it's difficult to imagine substantive benefits to shipping more than once or twice per day per team.

    How to get it? GitClear and LinearB both offer this stat as part of their respective Google DORA integrations. This stat can also be derived via the Four Keys open source project

    Good software engineering metrics

    Beneath the "top tier" metrics above exist the second-tier software engineering metrics. These metrics have their warts, but still can provide usable signal for a seasoned engineering manager who understands the nuance required to interpret these metrics in the context of their limitations.

    Commit Count

    GitHub developer annual commit count percentiles

    GitClear has spent no shortage of words chronicling the shortcomings of "Commit Count" as a benchmark stat to rely upon. This metric is prone to bursts of irrelevant noise (subrepo commits, deployment/cache assets, potentially rebase), and it affords the same weight to a single-character change, or a change that substantively modifies every file in the repo. That's the bad news.

    That said, by zooming out to a years-long view, and taking aggregate data of developers who (except in rare, team-specific circumstances) did not work under the belief that they were being judged by their commit count, these shortcomings get smoothed over, leaving a relatively signal-rich data measurement that correlates with Story Points completed up to 0.5 for teams with strong software estimation skills.

    ⚠️ How to game it? Commit Count is right up alongside "release count" or "lines of code" as the most trivial metrics to manipulate. If developers know that this measurement is being used to judge them, bad tidings are sure to ensue. However, if the metric is analyzed retrospectively, it can be used to establish an expected range of outcomes for new hires.

    How to get it? How not to get it? Every git provider and every stat provider will offer you the ability to view Commit Count. It is the easiest of all git metrics to derive.

    Pull Request Cycle Time

    Viewing Pull Request Cycle Time via GitClear PR stats
    Pull Request Cycle Time as shown among GitClear PR stats

    Not to be confused with "Deploy Cycle Time," this metric is meant to measure the weekday hours that transpire between the first commit on a particular issue, through to the time when that issue (Jira) has its pull request merged.

    This metric optimizes for teams that would like to speed up the time between when a ticket is started and when it has been reviewed and approved by all developers. Managers often think about PR Cycle Time as a proxy for "How long are developers taking to implement Jira tickets?" This is a good starting point for conceptualizing the metric, but there are two other major factors that are muddled together in the PR Cycle Time metric: 1) Are the instructions for the Jira unambiguous, and did they consider edge cases? 2) Was the developer able to get their PR reviewed and approved in a timely fashion?

    Before penalizing a team or developer for a low PR Cycle Time value, it is advisable to first inquire about the quality of the instructions in the tickets that developer is working on. If the design for a ticket is vague or incomplete, a higher PR Cycle Time inevitably follows.

    How to game it? This metric isn't easy to game, but it is possible to create an artificially low PR Cycle Time by waiting as long as possible before authoring one's first commit toward a Jira ticket. The longer a developer can wait before authoring the first commit (i.e., by continually amending a commit, rather than pushing it), the shorter the duration will be between that first commit and the conclusion of the PR review process.

    How to get it? All of the major Developer Analytics platforms offer some version of this report. Before using it to make decisions, be sure you have verified whether the metric is in fact Deploy Cycle Time or PR Cycle Time -- the remedy to reduce each interval will vary.

    ✅ Pull Request Completion Rate

    Example software engineering metric Pull Requests: stats on GitClear
    A sampling of the pull request stats provided by GitClear

    What percentage of pull requests were closed within a week of being opened? This rolls up several more granular questions, like "is the team engaged in responding promptly to new pull requests," "are they able to cooperate," and "have the developers polished their code before submitting it for merge?"

    How to game it? Acing the "Pull request completion rate" test means always closing PRs within a week. This is relatively hard to game, but it must be counterbalanced by a propulsive force such as Story Points or Line Impact, otherwise all of the team's incentives will be to polish work rather than ship it (or submit it for PR review).

    How to get it? All of the "name brand" Engineering Insight providers (GitClear, Pluralsight, Code Climate, Pinpoint) offer stats that illustrate the efficiency of a team's pull request process. We help compare the providers here.

    Test coverage

    Trying to capture some measure of test coverage is a reasonable goal to consider pursuing. However, it doesn't quite make the cut as a Top Tier metric for two reasons:

    1. It's an incomplete solution. Adequate testing must include functional and integration tests alongside unit tests, and no automated solution can know which pages need to be visited within the app or website, this still takes human direction
    2. It's very difficult to tie back to top-line business metrics. Test coverage is worth assessing as part of a Lead Developer's plan to monitor code quality, but it doesn't connect to business value directly enough to make the cut unto itself. A related but more business-functional metric to track code defects is "Bug Rate / Escaped Defects."

    Other software engineering metrics

    The list above is relatively short compared to corpus of past metrics that have been proposed by other authors. For the sake of completeness, let's review some of the most commonly mentioned metrics elsewhere, and why they didn't make the cut.

    Team Velocity

    This was one of the most popular metrics cited by other articles. It's recommended by TechBeacon, InfoPulse, and SeaLights.io. However, authors seem wary to define the units of this important metric. TechBeacon defines it as "how many 'units' of software the team typically completes in an iteration." Not so tangible. InfoPulse doesn't try specifying units. SeaLights says the units are "Story Points." Thus, we conclude that the notion of "velocity" is adequately captured by Story Points, or Line Impact by proxy.

    Code Churn

    The CEO of GitPrime (now acquired by Pluralsight) was among those who advocated for considering Code Churn. We argue in response that the implications of Code Churn are all over the map, which renders it very difficult to act on high churn. Metrics need to be actionable.

    Release/Sprint Burndown

    SeaLights and InfoPulse recommend paying attention to how a team is trending toward their sprint goals. We agree this is important, but it's already covered by the "Story Points" section above.

    Got a favorite developer metric?

    We are eager to hear what metrics are being used out in real world production environments. If you would like to discuss the use of metrics within your projects, you might consider stopping by GitClear's recently-debuted Community section, built to let engineering leaders discuss what has worked for them.

    We are also always eager to get feedback via . Let us know what you think, especially if there are other engineering topics where you'd like to see a deep-dive analysis like the above!