Technical Debt Plugin

Name	Technical Debt Plugin
Authors	Freddy Mallet, Olivier Gaudin
Homepage	http://docs.codehaus.org/display/SONAR/Technical+Debt+Plugin
Jira	http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SONARPLUGINS/component/13850
Most Recent Version	0.1-SNAPSHOT
Availability
State	Under development
License	LGPL v3
Download sources	http://svn.codehaus.org/sonar-plugins/trunk/technical-debt/
Download jar	http://repository.codehaus.org/org/codehaus/sonar-plugins/technical-debt/0.1/technical-debt-0.1.jar

Compatibility with Sonar

Plugin versions	1.6	1.7	1.8	1.9
0.1-SNAPSHOT

Description / Features

The Technical Debt plugin is an advanced metric that combines existing quality axes (Duplication, Violations, Complexity, Coverage, Documentation) to output a global measure.

To make it easy to understand, this global indicator reports how much it would cost to bring all axis to maximum values (100% coverage...) and therefore reimburse the Technical Debt. The indicator is calculated in man days and in $$ (that is now really easy to understand, isn't it ?). Next to the technical debt appears the repartition of each quality axis

Clicking on the debt brings to the usual drill down page showing modules / packages / classes most impacted

This plugin does not pretend to calculate in an exact manner the cost of reimbursement. Here are its primary objectives :

- enables to compare the projects global level of quality, rather than axis by axis

- help to understand what axis is going to cost most, thank to the repartition

Here is how the debt is currently calculated at resource level:

Debt(in man days)

cost_to_fix_duplications +
cost_to_fix_violations +
cost_to_comment_public_API +
cost_to_fix_uncovered_complexity +
cost_to_bring_complexity_below_threshold

Where :

cost_to_fix_duplications	cost_to_fix_one_block * duplicated_blocks
cost_to_fix_violations	cost_to fix_one_violation * mandatory_violations
cost_to_comment_public_API	cost_to_comment_one_API * public_undocumented_api
cost_to_fix_uncovered_complexity	cost_to_cover_one_of_complexity * uncovered_complexity_by_tests
cost_to_bring_complexity_below_threshold	cost_to_split_a_method * (function_complexity_distribution >= 8) + cost_to_split_a_class * (class_complexity_distribution >= 60)

Default values for costs can be adjusted by going to Configuration -> Settings -> Technical Debt.

Usage & Installation

Copy the jar into /extensions/plugins/ directory
Restart Sonar Web server

The plugin is then automatically activated on every resource.

Known limitations

A significant improvement to the would be to gather manual measures : see SONARPLUGINS-91

Having a weight on coding rules or being able to distinguish checkstyle, PMD and FIndbugs would add a lot accuracy