

Show HN: Debt Ceiling – Tech Debt Quantification/visibility/CI Tool - bglusman
https://github.com/bglusman/debt_ceiling

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bglusman
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.

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coderzach
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.

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bglusman
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 :-)

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bglusman
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

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hampsterx
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.

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bglusman
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...

