Technical Debt Plugin

Name	Technical Debt Plugin
Authors	Freddy Mallet, Olivier Gaudin
Jira	http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SONARPLUGINS/component/13850
Most Recent Version	0.2
License	LGPL v3
Sources	http://svn.codehaus.org/sonar-plugins/trunk/technical-debt/
Download	Latest stable : technical-debt-0.2.jar Called for a vote : technical-debt-0.3-SNAPSHOT.jar

Compatibility with Sonar

Plugin versions	1.8	1.9	1.10
0.1
0.2
0.3-SNAPSHOT

Description / Features

The plugin shows how much technical debt a project has got.
It consists in 4 unified indicators.

Quality axes

The debt is first calculated on the following basic axes : Duplication, Violations, Complexity, Coverage and Documentation.
It is then summed up to provide a global measure.

Full details of axes calculation are available here.

The debt ratio

The debt ratio gives a percentage of the current technical debt of the project versus the total possible debt for the project.
It enables to better compare projects. Indeed having $ 10,000 debt on a "small" project does not mean the same as the same debt on a big project.

The cost to reimburse

This gives in $$ what it would cost to clean all defects on every axis (no more violation, no more duplication...).

The work to reimburse

This is the cost to reimburse expressed in man days

The breakdown

This gives through a pie chart a view of the debt repartition across the 5 quality axis used.

Drill down

Clicking on an indicator brings the usual drill down page showing modules / packages / classes most impacted

Usage & Installation

Copy the jar into /extensions/plugins/ directory
Restart Sonar Web server
Launch a new quality analysis and the technical debt metrics will be fed

Known limitations

A significant improvement to the would be to gather manual measures : see SONARPLUGINS-91. Indeed this would enable to record other technical debts that are not gathered by Sonar to get a complete view.

Having a real cost to resolve for each rule would add a lot accuracy