November 2010 Summaries

The SQALE Quality Model is a widely adopted method for assessing Technical Debt, developed by DNV ITGS France and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0. It conforms to the ISO 9126 standard and provides a hierarchical structure with characteristic, sub-characteristic, and source code requirements. The model assesses the distance to requirement conformity by calculating remediation costs and offers a common language between managers and developers. A commercial SQALE plugin has been released for SonarSource, providing a user-friendly interface to visualize technical debt at various organizational levels, including departments, services, teams, and source code. This allows top managers and developers to discuss technical debt in a simplified manner, with atomic costs adding up to drill down from projects to source code. The SQALE Quality Model is orthogonal, meaning that quality flaws appear only once in the model, and it aggregates remediation costs to calculate quality indicators.