Gamifying Reduction of Technical Debt
summary
A config-driven Code Health Score system quantifies and gamifies technical debt by merging Android lint and Detect SAR outputs, applying weighted checks, and posting GitHub PR diffs and annotations; it runs on 30k Kotlin files (about 2M LOC) and calculates the full CI score in 55 seconds after merging results into one serif blob that revealed 31,000 warnings. The dashboard, quarterly leaderboard and PR comments drive fixes (accessibility violations removed, mocks replaced, four-quarter positive trend) while handling baselines and CI performance tradeoffs.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Motivation for tech debt gamification
- 4:22Codebase health score importance
- 9:02Simple health score system
- 11:33Team ownership and filtering
- 15:05Integrating Android lint
- 20:28Handling lint baselines
- 25:25PR health score diffs
- 29:00Optimizing PR checks and CI
- 31:10Freezing health score recipes
- 35:25Sustaining engagement
- 41:01Quarterly leaderboards
- 43:49Results and future improvements
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