Shifting Baselines

How quality degrades without anyone noticing

Your test suite takes eleven minutes to run. When was the last time it ran in under a minute? It’s easy for that number to creep up, slowly but surely. The team grows. People come and people go. What was once two minutes became five. New engineers only knew seven minutes. Now it’s eleven. This is normal.

Ecologists have a name for this: shifting baseline syndrome. Hundreds of years ago, beavers shaped a dramatically different North American landscape. Their dams created wetland ecosystems across regions that are now dry streambeds, vast prairie, or dense forest. As trapping crashed beaver populations, those wetlands vanished and ecosystems collapsed. Each human generation grew up knowing fewer beavers and altered landscapes, accepting that inheritance as the natural state. The baseline had shifted.

Test suites slow for many reasons, but turnover is what makes those slowdowns invisible. It shifts the baseline. The same mechanism can be seen elsewhere. Consider a team where error messages pipe into a Slack channel. Hundreds arrive daily. Most are informational, some are real errors. Extracting signal from noise becomes impossible. People stop reading it. The problem becomes invisible. New engineers join, see it’s ignored, and learn to ignore it too. The baseline shifts.

The pattern is difficult to see from inside. When someone new asks “what is going on here?” or “why does this take so long?”, the baseline hasn’t been established for them yet. That’s the moment. Listen. Then act: measure the current state, set explicit thresholds for key metrics, and schedule regular baseline audits. Document what “good” looks like before the team falls back into their normal routine.

Ecologists eventually reintroduced beavers to restore damaged ecosystems. Sometimes the equivalent intervention in software is starting fresh. More often, it’s deliberate measurement and conscious resistance to drift.