Technical Debt Evaluation (SQALE)

The Technical Debt Evaluation (SQALE) plugin provides an implementation of the SQALE Methodology in the SonarQube platform.

Enterprise Edition:	Included
Professional Edition:	Included
Sonar platform:	€ 2,700

All prices for one license per year per instance including support, upgrades, maintenance.

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Highlights

Provides remediation cost for technical debt
Unique SQALE visualizations: sunburst, pyramid, hotspots, kiviats
Uses ISO 9126 Quality Model

Overview

The objective of the SQALE (Software Quality Assessment based on Lifecycle Expectations) method is to support the evaluation of a software application’s source code in the most objective, accurate, reproducible and automated way possible. The Technical Debt Evaluation (SQALE) plugin is a full implementation of the SQALE methodology developed by Inspearit (formerly DNV ITGS). This method contains both a Quality Model and an Analysis Model. The SQALE Quality Model conforms to ISO/IEC 9126 with its underlying structured set of characteristics and sub-characteristics.

SQALE enables businesses to:

Rate the quality of an application from configurable source code requirements
Provide quantitative diagnosis for software types and suppliers
Organize the findings and clearly prioritize remedial actions

The use and the configuration of this product requires to have a deep understanding of the SQALE method freely available and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.

Features

The Technical Debt Evaluation (SQALE) plugin comes with a number of important features, including custom widgets, visualizations, rules and drill-downs.

SQALE Widgets

Once the Technical Debt Evaluation (SQALE) plugin is installed, 8 new widgets are available and can be inserted into any project dashboard.

SQALE Overview

This first widget simply displays high level measures to get a quick overview: the SQALE Rating, the SQALE Remediation Cost, the number of Lines of Code and the Effort required to reach upper SQALE Ratings.

SQALE Time Machine

This widget displays the SQALE remediation cost evolution over time.

SQALE Pyramid and SQALE Sunburst

These visualizations breaks down the SQALE remediation cost by characteristics, sub-characteristics and by requirements. By default only the characteristic level is displayed, to change this behavior the widget must be edited.

SQALE Remediation Cost

This widget provides a measure of the effort required to decrease the risk on a project.

SQALE File Distribution by Remediation Cost

This widget displays a hotspot of files with the highest remediation cost. It’s also possible to define a filter on a specific characteristic.

SQALE File Distribution by Rating

This widget displays an overview of files sorted by SQALE rating.

Drilldown Pages

The Technical Debt Evaluation (SQALE) plugin includes the capability to drilldown to display the breakdown of SQALE remediation cost by resource. A simple click on SQALE measures or in the sunburst will display the corresponding drilldown.

Filters

Like any other measures, the SQALE rating and the SQALE remediation cost can be used in the Filters service. For example, you can display all projects whose SQALE rating is less than C.

Known Issues

The SQALE plugin does not render properly with certain versions of Internet Explorer 6. It is therefore recommended to use a higher version of Internet Explorer or another browser with this plugin.