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CI Tool

github.com

18 pointsbglusman6 comments

Primary use case for this at present is probably in a CI/test suite (as I do at work), to fail if things get too bad (and output a number on each test run); though obviously one size fits all automatic tech debt accounting won't be very meaningful, most of the features are focused on allowing a team to decide what counts as tech debt to them... so I'd be grateful for any real world feedback or usecases in this direction that are hard to support with the current feature set! Also curious for general reactions or requests; the output is pretty simple at the moment.

This looks pretty awesome. I like the idea of a limit on the amount of bad code. Rather than having a hook that fails any time the code doesn't pass. Since that leads to you disabling it in emergencies and never turning it back on.

Yeah, some people don't like the tech debt metaphor or think it's always a 'bad thing', but I like the metaphor since, like real debt, it's useful but dangerous. Also, like the US debt ceiling, your limit probably depends on where you are at the time, not some perfect idea of where you want to be :-)

Oh, and I guess it's not obvious from title, right now this is Ruby only, but open to ideas and requests to make it cross language, or to a plugin architecture to make that easier

I presume you played with SonarQube? If not take a look, was very Java focused but is branching out, supports over 30 languages using an array of standard tools to do static code analysis.

Pretty much SonarQube is the only tool I have found and it's somewhat annoying as a few plugins are commercial and very expensive. As you say, a plugin architecture would be great.

I personally feel that in a few years time Code Analysis/Technical Debt tools will become standard as CI servers have.

And for the doubters, of course no tool is going to tell you very precisely the true Technical Debt of a project but knowing how the code base is changing over time in terms of code count/complexity/todo count, etc I think is something every development team (+ management) should be pay attention to.

I have not played with SonarQube, hadn't even heard of it until someone I told about Debt Ceiling last week or week before mentioned it to me. I thought it was closed source when I first looked, but I see it's at least partially open source at a glance, thanks for mention, though yeah, Java world is pretty far from ruby world...

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