Imagine you are a saboteur trying to infiltrate a company and wreck their ability to deliver software efficiently. Since you don’t want to be detected, your malevolent efforts are focused on encouraging the use of metrics in ways that will mislead the organization. What would this look like and what type of things would be likely to mislead teams while making everyone feel like they are getting great information?

Obviously the goal here is not to learn how to sabotage your teams, so please don’t tell people I’m trying to wreck your teams. J But taking a different perspective and looking at how some metrics could be used to maliciously mislead can help us identify places where accidentally mislead ourselves.