work-blog/articles/drafts/when-quality-becomes-quantity.md
Gregory Gauthier 544b773e8f 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 09:28:28 +01:00

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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