Technical Debt Plugin

Authors

Description / Features

The plugin evaluates how much technical debt a project is in. It consists of 4 advanced measures :

Clicking on an indicator brings the usual drill down.

The debt is first calculated on the basic axis : Duplication, Violations, Complexity, Coverage, Documentation and Design.
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 violations, no more duplications...).

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 distribution across the 6 quality axis.

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.