Monitoring engineering health isn’t just about checking how the team is performing today—it’s about understanding how performance evolves over time. A strong historical view allows teams to catch emerging issues early, identify positive trends, and build a data-driven narrative around improvement.

With the right metrics and tooling in place, engineering leaders can spot patterns in team behaviour and delivery habits that may impact long-term velocity, code quality, and collaboration.

Step 1: Use Targets to Establish a Baseline

➡️ Where: Targets

The Targets feature is powerful for tracking engineering health across time. Once you define a set of health metrics, you can easily visualize how your team has performed historically against those goals.

➡️Why this matters:

• It shifts the focus from one-time snapshots to continuous improvement.
• It makes trends visible and measurable, not just anecdotal.

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Setting a target today unlocks trend visibility tomorrow.

Step 2: Focus on Key Health Metrics

➡️ Where: Team Insights → Performance

The Health section surfaces critical metrics that reflect engineering balance, quality, and collaboration.

➡️Recommended health metrics:

• Unreviewed PRs – Signal poor collaboration or rushed delivery.
• Traceability – PRs linked to tickets ensure accountability and alignment with product goals.
• Knowledge Sharing Index (KSI) – High KSI reflects healthy, distributed code review practices.
• Unplanned Work (Unplanned Tickets) – Too much unplanned work can derail sprint goals and impact team morale.
• Churn – Can indicate unclear requirements, rework, or instability in delivery.
• High Risk Commits – Signal potential technical debt or instability in high-velocity areas of the codebase.

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Tracking these metrics weekly or monthly helps build a solid understanding of your team’s engineering “vitals.”

Step 3: Spot Patterns and Fluctuations Over Time

Once targets and health metrics are in place, use historical trend views to monitor:

• Are unreviewed PRs rising?
• Is traceability improving sprint over sprint?
• Are high risk commits spiking before key deadlines?
• A single bad week isn’t a red flag. A pattern of decline across multiple sprints or months is.

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Look for consistent dips or plateaus in areas you’ve targeted for improvement.

Key Takeaways

• Use Targets to benchmark and track team health over time.
• Focus on metrics like Unreviewed PRs, KSI, Traceability, Churn, and Unplanned Work.
• Long-term trends are more meaningful than daily spikes—watch for sustained changes.
• Healthy engineering teams are consistent, collaborative, and continuously improving—not just fast.