Code Climate Case Study: Kickstarter

Results Achieved

17%

Increase in Pull Requests Merged

63%

Decrease in Cycle Time

29%

Increase in Commits per Day

The engineering team was slowed down by a decade of accumulated technical debt.

Kickstarter engineers frequently worked with legacy code dating back to 2009.

Engineers struggled to advocate for dedicating resources to addressing technical debt.

When Mark joined as VP of Engineering, he aimed to align engineering work with business objectives.

He reorganized teams and gave each team ownership of a specific part of the product.

Mark emphasized outcome-oriented engineering: the goal was not “Is the code good?” but “Is Kickstarter good?”

While engineering teams understood business goals, the executive team struggled to understand engineering challenges.

A large portion of the codebase was difficult to work with, slowing engineers down.

Executives prioritized shipping new features over refactoring legacy code.

Mark used Velocity to illustrate how technical debt was limiting deployment.

He monitored weekly throughput, measured by merged pull requests, to spot productivity dips.

Velocity provided concrete, objective metrics—based on pull requests rather than subjective story points.

This allowed Mark to identify when a scrum team was genuinely bogged down compared to previous sprints.

When anomalies appeared, he reviewed real-time reports highlighting riskiest pull requests—those open longest or with heavy review activity.

After several weeks, the data clearly showed legacy code was consistently slowing the team down.

With Velocity’s concrete evidence, Mark could demonstrate to leadership how technical debt was derailing engineering productivity.

“When I could advocate for invisible work, we could align the objective of the business and the engineering team.”

—Mark Wunsch, VP of Engineering, Kickstarter