Our software development team is consistently hitting their weekly metric for tickets closed, but our customers are complaining that bugs are being rushed through and marked resolved without real fixes. How do we redesign our engineering scorecard metrics to prevent developers from gaming their productivity numbers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you measure activity without measuring quality, your team will optimize for the activity at the expense of the business. Rushing buggy code to hit a weekly closed ticket target is classic scorecard gaming. To fix this, you must pair your productivity metric with a quality counterweight on the scorecard.

You need to change the measurable from simply tickets closed to a multi-dimensional metric or add a secondary leading indicator that holds the team accountable for the quality of their work. Consider these options:

- Reopened ticket rate: Track the number of closed tickets that are reopened within seven days due to unresolved issues or regressions.
- Customer regression rate: Track how many bug fixes introduce new issues into production.
- Peer review pass rate: Track the percentage of code reviews that require revisions before deployment.

By putting a quality counterweight directly on the scorecard, you force the seat owner to focus on clean execution rather than raw volume. If the quality metric drops, the team cannot celebrate hitting their productivity target. They must manage both.

Bring this issue to your next Level 10 Meeting and IDS it with your engineering lead. Ensure they understand that their seat is responsible for stable, working code, not just high-volume mouse clicking. If they GWC their seat, they will embrace metrics that measure actual value delivery instead of superficial busywork.