Debugging Your Team: How to Find the True Root Cause of Slow Velocity

“Velocity is down.”

These three words strike fear into the heart of every engineering manager.

When the DORA metrics dip or cycle time increases, the pressure from the C-suite mounts. The knee-jerk reaction is usually to push harder: “We need more focus,” or “Let’s cut scope.”

But low velocity is not the problem. It is a symptom. Treating the symptom without understanding the disease leads to burnout and bad code.

The 4 Types of “Slowness”

To fix velocity, you must debug your organization just like you debug code. You need to identify which type of slowness you are dealing with:

The “Investment” Slowness (Good): The team is slowing down because they are paying down technical debt, refactoring a brittle system, or onboarding new hires. This is a temporary dip for a long-term gain.

The “Friction” Slowness (Bad): The team is waiting on CI/CD pipelines, fighting flaky tests, or dealing with a lack of staging environments. This is a tooling problem.

The “Alignment” Slowness (Bad): Developers are building the wrong things because requirements are unclear, leading to high rework rates. This is a product management problem.

The “People” Slowness (Complex): There are personality conflicts, burnout, or skill mismatches within the squad. This is a management problem.

Why Dashboards Fail

Standard engineering dashboards show you that velocity is down, but they rarely show you why.

A graph cannot tell you that your lead developer is demoralized because they hate the new framework.

Automating the Root Cause Analysis

You need data that connects the dots.

Code signals: High churn (rewriting lines of code) usually indicates unclear requirements.

Work signals: High work in progress (WIP) usually indicates excessive context switching.

People signals: Behavioral mismatches or lack of upskilling opportunities.

NotchUp automates this diagnosis. It identifies the reasons for frequent defects or slow velocity for a specific project team by correlating technical signals with human context.

It doesn’t just give you a number. It gives you the why, so you can fix it.

Diagnose your bottlenecks. Run a team health audit with NotchUp