The most easily gamed as well... I have no idea how these people thinking about introducing a metric to measure others don't realise that whenever that happens it just becomes another game.

It really isn't that hard to know that through experience and a little bit of forethought.

The other day I introduced this idea to a team member.

We have a separate budget for "development" and "hardening" - these two are actually stages - one starts only after the other ends and that moment is already precisely scheduled. No QA team so far.

So we play this little game of delivering something, anything and allow ourselves to leave some details behind.

I know of multiple problems in my code which made it past review, because there's no incentive to block merging on grounds other than code style, and maybe some glaring issues.

My gut feeling is that this approach is more expensive.