Technical Debt

What is Technical Debt -

Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

So my obvious next step was to find ways to measure technical dept. Here is what i found

Tool to measure Technical Debt -

SQALE + Sonar -

With SQALE, Sonar can now fully embrace the Quality Model world as SQALE is the leading-edge method to assess Technical Debt while conforming to ISO 9126 standard. The method has been developed by DNV ITGS France and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0. You can have a look at the SQALE Method Definition document to get a good understanding of the methodology, but here are the main principles :

* Quality means conformance to requirements, therefore those requirements should be first defined. They should be : atomic, unambiguous, non-redundant, justifiable, acceptable, implementable and verifiable. For example “each method should have a complexity lesser than 10″. Those requirements are called rules in Sonar.

* The SQALE methodology assesses the distance to the requirements conformity by considering the necessary remediation cost to bring the source code to conformity. For instance, if the branch coverage of a source file is 60% whereas 65% is required for each file, the remediation cost will be effort to cover the missing number of branches to reach the required branch coverage threshold of 65%.

* The SQALE Method adds up remediation costs to calculate quality indicators. Indeed when you have several debts, does it really make sense to average them ?

* The SQALE Quality Model is orthogonal meaning that a quality flaw appears once and only once in the Quality Model.

More about Squale/Sonar - http://www.sonarsource.org/