Press Release
CISQ Announces Automated Technical Debt Measure Specification V2
Estimating the effort to repair software systems
BOSTON, MA – NOVEMBER 7, 2023 – The Consortium for Information & Software Quality™ (CISQ™) today announced Version 2 of the Automated Technical Debt Measure Specification. The new specification predicts corrective maintenance effort for guiding management decisions and resource allocations. Version 2 builds on the weaknesses in CISQ’s Automated Source Code Quality Measures (now an Object Management Group® and ISO standard, referred to as ISO 5055) for measuring the structural quality of software in the areas of reliability, security, performance efficiency, and maintainability. Version 2 uses estimates from professional developers of the time required to repair each of the 138 weaknesses in ISO 5055 to develop an estimate of the technical debt residing in a software system and the effort to remediate it.
“Technical debt describes how sub-optimal design decisions, architectural flaws, and coding errors accumulate a debt you must repay through corrective maintenance during future releases,” said Dr. Bill Curtis, Executive Director of CISQ. “Technical debt is a predictor of the corrective maintenance effort needed for an application. Our new Automated Technical Debt Measure specification helps organizations predict the future costs of corrective maintenance for both IT and embedded software.”
Estimates of future corrective maintenance costs provide input to decisions such as budgeting maintenance, allocating developer effort, or replacing an application. Corrective maintenance includes all the activities involved in analyzing a weakness, designing and implementing a correction, testing it, and deployment.
Download the CISQ Automated Technical Debt Measure Specification from the website.
About CISQ
The Consortium for Information and Software Quality™ (CISQ™) is an industry leadership group that develops international standards for automating the measurement of software size and structural quality from the source code. The standards, written by CISQ, enable organizations developing or acquiring software-intensive systems to measure the operational risk software poses to the business, as well as estimate the cost of corrective maintenance. CISQ was co-founded by the Object Management Group® (OMG®) and Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. For more information, visit https://www.it-cisq.org/
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