Stop Shipping for the Metric: The Case Against Needless Software Churn

The German word Verschlimmbesserung — an improvement that only makes things worse — captures a familiar frustration: the SaaS update that relocates a button, renames a menu, and quietly breaks a workflow users depended on. The post argues this isn’t engineering incompetence but a predictable response to incentives. Teams ship disruptive change because that’s what their metrics reward.

The author leans on Eliyahu Goldratt’s dictum that people behave according to how they’re measured. When organizations treat point releases and shipping velocity as the goal, they get exactly that: motion for its own sake, regardless of whether it improves the product. Churn-based metrics produce churn; if change itself is the reward, useful stability gets punished.

The counterpoint is that novelty isn’t inherently valuable — the author points to enduringly usable tools like Office 2003 that were never forced to reinvent themselves. Stability is framed as a genuine feature, and restraint — knowing when not to ship — as an engineering discipline worth naming and defending.