> This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart.
You are describing this far more charitably than I would. I would describe it as idiocy.
For some (idiotic) reason some management types have this belief that when they measure some metric, it should fit some ideal shape when they put it on a graph, whether or not that makes any sense.
This is exactly the fallacious thinking behind stack ranking where people persistently abuse/misunderstand the whole concept of normal distribution by changing employee evaluation scores to match a normal distribution. It's like these people took a statistics class and only remembered the shapes they saw (and really only one shape) and none of the concepts underpinning those shapes.
Anyone who subscribes to this dangerously simplistic mode of thinking shouldn't have a position of leadership. Unfortunately many times everyone in leadership subscribes to the same cargo cult so they can't hold each other accountable.
We had a client pushing us on our velocity. Our team was doing a quality-first approach which took far more time than the other team's approach to pitch stuff over the wall to QA and wait for bugs to roll in. Our leadership took the deliberate approach of gaming the points system to improve our appearance while keeping the team 100% focussed on deliverying quality work at the same pace we had been all along. We didn't change a thing except inflate our estimates and the client was happy :)
You are describing this far more charitably than I would. I would describe it as idiocy.
For some (idiotic) reason some management types have this belief that when they measure some metric, it should fit some ideal shape when they put it on a graph, whether or not that makes any sense.
This is exactly the fallacious thinking behind stack ranking where people persistently abuse/misunderstand the whole concept of normal distribution by changing employee evaluation scores to match a normal distribution. It's like these people took a statistics class and only remembered the shapes they saw (and really only one shape) and none of the concepts underpinning those shapes.
Anyone who subscribes to this dangerously simplistic mode of thinking shouldn't have a position of leadership. Unfortunately many times everyone in leadership subscribes to the same cargo cult so they can't hold each other accountable.