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Note: The following is an excerpt from the actual document. It is provided here as a convenience and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document as the authoritative reference.

The purpose of this specification is to establish a standard for automating a measure of Technical Debt that can be computed by source code analysis technologies which have implemented the CISQ Quality Characteristic measures. Within this defined focus, Technical Debt is calculated as an estimate of the effort to fix violations of good architectural and coding practices that must be remediated because of their risk and cost to the business. The foundation for specifying this measure has been provided in the CISQ Quality Characteristic measures approved as OMG standards, namely the Automated Source Code Reliability/Security/Performance Efficiency/Maintainability Measures. Using these OMG standards to provide the content for a measure of Technical Debt allows it to be based on published standards.

Adoption of the Technical Debt metaphor is growing as a means of communicating between IT executives and their technical staffs about quality issues and costs. Commercial IT executives have embraced the concept of Technical Debt for its value in predicting such factors as the costs of future corrective maintenance and the difficulty of enhancing or scaling an application. Currently, several static analysis vendors have added a measure of Technical Debt to their features, but none of these measures are based on an approved international standard.