Monitor Engineering Health Over Time

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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.

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.