The DETANGLE® metrics about Technical Debt make up an “atomic model” of Technical Debt illustrated by the following picture:

Consequences, Effort KPIs and Health Factors for Technical Debt

Technical Debt has many aspects which are interrelated to each other. It manifests itself in two opposite directions as indicated by the the most inner and the most outer red circles above.  It affects two different sets of stakeholders

• the business side like product managers, product owners or project managers and
• the engineering side like software developers, testers and architects

The business side has to deal with the business consequences like

• Budget overrun
• Missed launch dates
• Angry customers
• Long time-to-market

whereas the engineering side has to cope with the technical consequences of technical debt as low quality levels of different engineering artifacts or processes as

• Code
• Architecture
• Tests
• Documentation
• Development processes.

DETANGLE® aims at bridging the gap between these two circles by introducing two intermediate circles.

First, DETANGLE® measures Technical Debt on the technical side by using its own Technical Health Factor metrics and by integrating the analysis results of  3rd-party tools like the SonarQube code quality tool. This measurement relationship is captured by the two inner circles of the “atomic model”.

Furthermore, the two outer circles represent a similar relationship. The consequences of Technical Debt (i.e. budget overrun or long time-to-market) are measured by DETANGLE® Effort KPIs like the ratio of maintenance effort and feature development effort compared to the whole system development effort. The following table includes the two measurement relationships:

Finally, DETANGLE® fills in the missing link by correlating Business KPIs with Health Factors. And it identifies hotspots of both, Effort KPIs and Technical Health Factors, in order to correlate them and categorize code areas along the following criteria as part of a root cause analysis:

The sections on

• DETANGLE® Metric Categories lists all metric  categories and
• DETANGLE® Metrics at a Glance provides an overview of all metrics in detail.