Quality gates that actually hold the line

A quality gate is only useful if it blocks the right things and nothing else. Configure it and it evaluates on every analysis and in PR checks.

Good starting policy for most teams:

• Block on any new critical issue (regressions, not legacy debt).
• Block on breaking Contract Drift with live cross-repo callers.
• Warn on rising tech debt or major-issue count.
• Set a minimum score only once your baseline is stable — otherwise it fails on day one and gets ignored.

The gate reads all its counts from the same reconciled snapshot, so it evaluates a self-consistent picture — no arguing with a number that disagrees with itself. Start strict on new problems, lenient on the backlog, and tighten over time.