How do you measure and improve the technical health of a team and codebase?

Question

Accepted Answer

**Technical health** is how sustainably a team can deliver, code quality, system reliability, and delivery velocity together. You can't improve what you don't measure, but the goal is *insight to drive improvement*, never a number to hit. Metrics are a flashlight, not a scoreboard.

## What to measure

```text
DELIVERY (DORA metrics — well-researched, balanced):
  - Deployment frequency        - Lead time for changes
  - Change failure rate         - Time to restore service

QUALITY / RELIABILITY:
  - Production incident rate & severity
  - Test coverage trend (direction, not a vanity %)
  - Escaped-bug rate

TEAM / FLOW:
  - Cycle time, time-in-review (slow review = hidden bottleneck)
  - Recurring pain points (survey the team — they know)
```

## Use DORA, balanced

The four DORA metrics are valuable because they *balance* speed and stability, you can't game one without hurting another. High deploy frequency with a high failure rate is a red flag, not a win. Track the set, not a single number.

## A concrete example

Lead time for changes is creeping up. You dig in and find PRs sit in review for days. The metric pointed you to a real bottleneck, a review process problem, that you'd never have spotted by gut feel. You fix the process, and the metric improves as a *side effect*.

## The big pitfall: gaming

The moment a metric becomes a target, people optimize the number, not the outcome (Goodhart's Law). Coverage targets breed worthless tests; velocity targets breed inflated estimates. Use metrics to *find* problems, then talk to people, never to rank or punish them.

## Why it matters

Without signals, technical health degrades invisibly until the team is mysteriously slow and nobody can say why.

Good measurement makes the invisible visible, so you can invest where it counts, and prove the impact when you do.