I saw the thread title and my first thought was, of course, "prove it." Doubling productivity by just tuning out 'info' level findings sounds like the kind of oversimplified victory lap we see before the quarterly billing surprise hits. It reeks of a developer-centric metric that ignores the actual cost ledger.
That said, I'm not entirely dismissing the premise. In Checkmarx, the default rulesets are notoriously noisy. If your team was drowning in hundreds of "Encryption Not Strong Enough" flags on internal config files and "Hardcoded Password" on test strings, then yes, turning that firehose down to a trickle will let your devs breathe. They'll stop ignoring the scan results entirely. But "productivity doubled"? Let's translate that. Does that mean twice as many story points moved? Or just that the same number of tickets now get through the SAST gate without a manual review bottleneck? Big difference.
The real cost question—which no one in these threads ever seems to have the data for—is what did you trade? You didn't just mute 'info,' you redefined your acceptable risk profile. Have you quantified the potential blast radius of a missed low-severity finding that later gets chained into something exploitable? The cloud bill for a remediation sprint six months from now is never factored into these "productivity" gains. I'd be more convinced if you shared the before/after on your actual pipeline metrics: scan duration, triage time per build, and most importantly, the *false positive rate* for the remaining high/critical findings. If that stayed constant or improved, then maybe you've actually tuned something correctly.
Otherwise, this is just technical debt with a fancy badge. You've shifted cost from developer time today to potential security incident response later. Classic capex vs. opex play, honestly. I'd love to see the billing codes for that.
- cost_observer_42
cost_observer_42
You're right to question the productivity metric. In my experience, these claims usually map to a reduction in false-positive triage time, not a fundamental increase in output. The doubled productivity likely means developers spend 15 minutes per PR reviewing scans instead of 30, which gets framed as a 100% improvement.
Your point about the trade-off is critical. We did a similar tuning exercise for our data pipeline CI checks, muting 'info' findings for things like trivial variable duplication in transformation scripts. The quantified risk we accepted was that a future, more complex script with a similar pattern might get through. We modeled it: the blast radius of a missed SQL inefficiency in a single pipeline is bounded by the cost of that query. We traded a guaranteed daily time sink for a potential, quantifiable cost overrun that we deemed acceptable.
Without that cost/risk ledger, you're just moving noise from one dashboard to the incident report.
data is the product
Exactly. The "doubled productivity" is just repackaged noise reduction. The real metric is how many actual security reviews were skipped because of that redefined risk profile.
And you're right about the missing data. No one runs the real experiment: leave the tuned rules in place for six months, then run the original noisy ruleset against all merged code as an audit. That's the only way to see what slipped through. I bet most orgs wouldn't publish those results.
Caveat emptor.
Yeah, the "doubling" metric is pretty suspect. In our GitHub Actions setup, we started ignoring info-level Dockerfile linting flags for non-production images. Our "productivity boost" was just PRs getting approved faster because devs weren't blocked fixing formatting in a dev container. It felt good, but like you said, it's just hiding the triage time.
Have you seen any teams actually track that trade-off risk? I'm curious what a "quantified blast radius" even looks like for a missed low-severity SAST finding. Is it just a guess, or are there real models for it?
Learning by breaking
You've put your finger on the exact spot where the vendor's marketing copy ends and the actual engineering begins. The 'acceptable risk profile' shift is the whole ball game, but it's never itemized on the invoice. They sell you noise reduction as a feature, not as a deliberate, quantified acceptance of risk.
I'd bet the team that 'doubled productivity' didn't run the cost/benefit model you're describing. They just got fed up and turned the dial until the pain stopped. The 'blast radius' is an unknown because calculating it properly is a ton of work. It's easier to call it a win and move on until something eventually pops.
—DW