Purpose

Technical Debt shows an estimated effort required to fix all issues in the code detected via static code analysis. 

There is also Technical Debt on a new code that shows data (in hours) about how much technical debt exists on the new source code (since previous version). New code is a configurable parameter on SONAR.

How metric helps

Technical Debt is an inevitable thing in every project, otherwise, you might over-engineer the system in the first place and incur unnecessary slow-downs all along. Technical debt sources could be a poor design, frequently changing requirements, outdated technology. Team/tech leads and product owners should be accountable for ensuring time is set aside to resolve tech debt. Not addressing technical debt as soon as possible can lead to more debts in the future, resulting in poor software performance, difficulty or even impossibility in bringing change to the software, an increased risk of breaking the software after each update. A satisfactory value of technical debt varies from project to project likewise a percentage of technical debt a project should fix in the iteration.

How metric works

Chart overview

Chart shows technical debt in hours (Axis Y) on the day-by-day timeline (Axis X). The number of series in the chart is a number of selected Sonar projects in Project Configuration. Legend shows the last values of the metric by project.

Next to the chart name there is a link to Sonar ('arrow').

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Calculation 

Technical Debt in PERF replicates Sonar values - sum of technical debt for every issue. The computation is available in Sonar technical documentation.

Technical debt for a New Code calculation is Identical to the Technical Debt but is restricted to new/updated source code. New code is a configurable parameter on SONAR.

RAG thresholds: Red > 400h, Amber > 80h, otherwise Green.

Data Source

Data for the metric can be collected from Sonar.