[allannienhuis]

I did this with a project that was worked on by a large team (50+ devs, many, many, many kloc) when we first added linting to the project (this was very early 2000s) - we automatically tracked the number of errors and warnings at each build, persisted them, and then failed the build if the numbers went up. So it automatically adjusted the threshold.

It worked really well to incrementally improve things without forcing people to deal with them all the time. People would from time to time make sure they cleaned up a number of issues in the files they happened to be working on, but they didn't have to do them all (which can be a problem with strategies that for example lint only the changed files, but require 0 errors). We threw a small line chart up one one of our dashboards to provide some sense of overall progress. I think we got it down to zero or thereabouts within a year or so.