Visualizing the health of your codebase offers an actionable starting point and a potential trigger for paying down technical debt. However, any organizations looking to improve their delivery efficiency have to take a broader perspective. In addition to the technical improvements, you also need to reshape the engineering and collaborative strategies to ensure no new bottlenecks are introduced.
All of these changes are investments that take time, meaning we need to bring visibility to the outcome to ensure improvements have a real effect. Measuring trends in unplanned work offers a simple solution by complementing the code-level metrics with a higher-level perspective.