work-blog/articles/drafts/when-quality-becomes-quantity.md

When Quality Becomes Quantity — Goodhart's Law and the Metrics Trap. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[1] This is the missing chapter of your Cucumber polemic. Coverage percentages, pass rates, defect counts — all of them degrade the moment they become OKRs. You already hint at this in Five Essential Lessons when you say "automation is a tool, not a goal"; Goodhart lets you prove it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
feat(drafts): add initial drafts for philosophy-inspired testing articles Introduces nine new draft articles exploring intersections of software testing with philosophy, epistemology, and related concepts: - On Flakiness (Heraclitus and non-deterministic tests) - Popper and the Risky Test (demarcation criterion) - Regression as Institutional Memory (Wittgenstein's On Certainty) - Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist (Polanyi's tacit dimension) - Test Environments as Platonic Shadows (Plato's cave allegory) - The Tester as Witness (legal metaphor and testimony) - Testing Probabilistic Systems (ML and statistical testing) - The Oracle Problem (oracles in testing frameworks) - When Quality Becomes Quantity (Goodhart's Law and metrics) 2026-04-20 08:28:28 +00:00			`When Quality Becomes Quantity — Goodhart's Law and the Metrics Trap. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[1] This is the missing chapter of your Cucumber polemic. Coverage percentages, pass rates, defect counts — all of them degrade the moment they become OKRs. You already hint at this in Five Essential Lessons when you say "automation is a tool, not a goal"; Goodhart lets you prove it.`

			`[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law`