This question comes up often when I tell people about my project Landscape (https://landscape.io https://landscape.io), which is similar to this except that it

This question comes up often when I tell people about my project Landscape (https://landscape.io https://landscape.io), which is similar to this except that it is for Python. My argument is that often, especially on a large existing codebase, you'll get thousands of warnings and in that case, having the trends over time is useful as a way of measuring progress. The relative change is more important than the absolute value.