We want steady velocity, not wild swings.
Have you noticed how early in our projects we fly; but later, code messes pile up. That mess creates back pressure - the bigger the mess, the slower our team goes.
And then our slow team faces even more schedule pressure, which encourages quick hacks that make the mess worse. That feedback loop can grind the team toward immobility.
The “fix” is often, to add more people, but the new hires learn from the existing messy code base, and they often take on the same behaviors that produced it.
Instead of rescuing velocity, you risk multiplying the mess!
Instead! We need to make continuous cleanup nonnegotiable. Use testing, pairing, refactoring, and simple design to keep the codebase healthy. Keep batch sizes small and finish end‑to‑end work so the system never becomes a teaching tool for bad habits.
When the team protects the code, the productivity stays stable.
Discussion for your team
- What do new hires learn from our codebase?
- Are we refactoring and pairing regularly?
- Are there some rules and habits we can encourage to prevent a downward spiral?