Debt Ceiling Chat

DebtCeiling

Work in progress, feedback and PR's appreciated

Main goal is to enforce a technical debt ceiling and tech debt reduction deadlines for your Ruby project programmatically via static analysis as part of your application's test suite. Eventually perhaps will aid in visualizing tech debt as a graph or graphs (breakind down debt into various categories and sources).

Current features include:

  • configuring points per RubyCritic grade per file line
  • Whitelisting/blacklisting files by matching path/filename
  • Modifying or replacing default calculation on a per file basis
  • Reporting the single greatest source of debt based on your definitions
  • Reporting total debt for the git repo based on your definitions
  • Running the binary from a test suite to fail if debt ceiling is exceeded
  • Running the binary from a test suite to fail if debt deadline is missed

To integrate in a test suite, use set_debt_ceiling and/or debt_reduction_target_and_date in your configuration and call DebtCeiling.calculate(root_dir) from your test helper as an additional test. It will exit with a non-zero failure if you exceed your ceiling or miss your target, failing the test suite.

These features are largely are demonstrated/discussed in examples/.debt_ceiling which demonstrates configuring debt ceiling

Additional customization is supported via two method hooks in the debt class, which debt_ceiling will load from a provided extension_file_path in the main config file, which should look like the example file

You can configure/customize the debt calculated using a few simple commands in a .debt_ceiling file in the project's home directory

set_debt_ceiling 500
#exceeding this will fail a test, if you run debt_ceiling binary from test suite
debt_reduction_target_and_date 100, 'Jan 1 2015'
#exceeding this will fail after the target date (parsed by Chronic)

#set the multipliers per line of code in a file with each letter grade
b_cost_per_line 10
c_cost_per_line 20
d_cost_per_line 40
f_cost_per_line 100

#load custom debt calculations (see examples/debt.rb) from this path
extension_file_path "./debt.rb"

#only count debt scores for files matching these strings (converted to regexes)
whitelist_matching %w(app lib)

#or.... exclude debt scores for files matching these strings (obviously mutually exclusive, raises error if both present)
#blacklist_matching %w(schema.rb routes.rb)

As mentioned/linked above, additional customization is supported.

As shown in example file, pass a path to extension_file_path command pointing to a file defining DebtCeiling::Debt like the one in examples directory, and define its methods for your own additional calculation per file.

Right now it lacks all tests... feel free to open a PR!

I'll try and add test coverage where it makes sense as API matures.

TODO: planned features/ideas

todo_cost 500 #cost per comment matching /TODO/

debt_per_reference_to deprecated_regex, 500 # help transition away from deprecated APIs

points_per_regex_match REGEX, 500 # seems like an alias for above maybe, nix?

Other ideas:

rubocop/cane integration debt for style violations

every line over x ideal file size is y points of debt

multipliers for important files

include one of the JS complexity/debt analysis libraries below, or another if anyone had another suggestion: