Case Study: Kickstarter reduces technical debt and boosts engineering throughput with Code Climate

Code Climate helped Kickstarter identify the hidden costs of technical debt.

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform with 250+ employees, was struggling with the hidden burden of more than a decade of technical debt. As the engineering team inherited more legacy code, it became harder to ship features reliably, but leadership lacked hard data to prove that the slowdown was caused by technical debt.

Code Climate helped Kickstarter by using its Velocity reporting to track weekly throughput, merged pull requests, and the riskiest pull requests to pinpoint where work was getting bogged down. With this data, the team demonstrated the impact of legacy code and improved performance, resulting in a 25% increase in pull request throughput, a 83% reduction in cycle time, and a 29% increase in commits per day.

Kickstarter

Mark Wunsch

Vice President Engineering