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Discussion on: What's your Technical Debt's Interest Rate?

 
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Eric Damtoft

I think a sort of "rubric" model would be interesting where you could score from 1-5 in a number of categories like consistency, documentation, architecture, testing, and tooling, and then have a change frequency multiplier. So a perfect "zero debt" system would be one that had a well thought out architecture, applied that in a consistent way, had thorough unit and integration tests, and good quality automated build processes.

For a system which missed some points, the score would be multiplied by how often changes were made to a system, so that poor quality but infrequently modified part of the code might score similarly to an better quality part of the code which was in an editing hotpath.