Case Study: Kickstarter boosts engineering throughput with Code Climate

Kickstarter boosts PR throughput 17% with Code Climate

Kickstarter faced a challenge where its engineering teams were significantly slowed down by legacy code and technical debt. These invisible technical problems were difficult to communicate to non-technical leadership, making it hard to advocate for dedicating resources to refactoring. Kickstarter's VP of Engineering, Mark Wunsch, used Code Climate's Velocity engineering analytics tool to diagnose the issues with data.

Code Climate's solution provided concrete metrics that quantified how technical debt was impeding productivity. By analyzing pull request throughput and cycle time, Code Climate's data proved the need for refactoring and helped align leadership on a plan. After dedicating time to address the biggest blockers, Kickstarter saw a 17% increase in pull requests merged and a 63% decrease in cycle time, creating a major win for both engineers and the business.

Kickstarter