DebtCollector.NET

This is a simple Modern .NET tool that lets you perform analysis on your code to quickly discover potential technical debt hotspots. The goal is to help prioritize work, so instead of trying to focus on 1000000 lines of code for refactors we can narrow down our focus to 500 lines (these numbers are just an example, the point is we want to reduce the focus).

The tool leverages LibGit2Sharp and Roslyn to perform analysis on C# code in a git repo and was inspired by Adam Tornhills talk Prioritizing Technical Debt as If Time & Money Matters.

How To Use It

Create an appsettings.json file in the DebtCollector.NET directory with a PathToRepo property, for example:

{
    "Logging": {
        "LogLevel": {
            "Default": "Debug",
            "System": "Information",
            "Microsoft": "Information"
        }
    },
    "PathToRepo": "C:\\My\\Code\\Projects\\TwitchEverywhere",
    "DaysSince": 365,
    "Modes": ["hotspot"],
    "GitClient": "cli",
    "GroupDepth": 1
}

Field	Description	Valid Values
PathToRepo	The path to the git repo you want to analyze	Any valid string path on the filesystem
DaysSince	The number of days since the last commit to consider	Any valid int
Modes	The analysis modes to run	methodXray, hotspotGrouped, lastModified
GitClient	The git client to use	cli, libgit2sharp
GroupDepth	The depth to group paths to	Any valid int

Run the DebtCollector.NET project and it will output two CSV files:

• mostCommittedFiles.csv: A list of files sorted by most committed
• xray.csv: A list of all methods from the first file in the previous list sorted by most committed

For example running this on the TwitchEverywhere code we get an output like this:

Notice the outlier? It has almost double the commits as each of the other files! To get more details on why that might be, we can look at the Xray results and see this:

Now it's clear that the MessageCallback method is something that developers work with extremely often! So we can focus on that when looking to do refactors. 🎉

Path Grouping

DebtCollector.NET can also group paths to a certain depth through the GroupDepth setting. For example if we have the following paths:

[
    { "path": "first/first/path/to/file1", "count": 10 },
    { "path": "first/first/path/to/file2", "count": 2 },
    { "path": "first/second/path/to/file3", "count": 50 },
    { "path": "first/second/path/to/file4", "count": 4 },
    { "path": "first/third/path/to/file5", "count": 9 }
]

And we set GroupDepth to 1, we will get the following output:

[
  { "path": "first", "count": 75 }
]

If no GroupDepth is set, the output will be the same as the full paths list.