How do you know there is such a thing as a death spiral? How do you know these symptoms apply to the "death spiral" condition. How do you know your solutions actually alleviate the symptoms or abandon the condition?
Death spiral: Working on components of a larger project with no hope of ever integrating all pieces into a coherent final release. Everything gets incrementally improved in isolation, but nobody can figure out how to cut a product out of all the pieces.
[1]: Plenty of demand exists in the delusional minds of executives, PMs, and clueless employees though. It just doesn't match the real world.
Doesn't need to be hyper game-able beancounter make peoples pay depend on fudging the numbers. IN fact that will create negative creativity. You get better results if you write down and graph the departmental ratios of currently open bugs vs lines of git commits and for god sakes don't let anyone know or the gameification is on...