Shameless plug: I didn't know about their SonarQube project until I'd built debt ceiling, but while ruby only at the moment, it is an open source attempt to provide some mechanics for defining and tracking some quantified approximation of technical debt. No claims it's perfect of course, but would love more real world feedback and/or feature requests! Also would like to extend it to handle JavaScript analysis as well, ideally through a plug-in architecture that could easily handle arbitrary other languages as well.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm not working on a ruby project, but if I was, I'd give this a try.
I like how `debt_ceiling` supports `TODO` or `# TECHDEBT` tags.
When I think of technical debt, there are some kinds that don't seem easy to automatically measure: "we made an assumption 6 months ago that turned out to be quite wrong, but we haven't had enough time to go back and rework it yet". This could manifest as poor choices of data structures, or an entire system/subsystem that turns out to be nonsensical given increased understanding of requirements. People who understand the problems can manually tag the code, so it's good to see tool support for these kinds of annotations.
I like the tool. As for the extensions, I would suggest that in my experience SonarQube has the same ability for extension, and does most of its work in the open. So it might be worth considering turning your project into a plugin (or plugins) for SonarQube?
https://github.com/bglusman/debt_ceiling