NDepend: New Feature “Technical Debt and Quality Gate”

What are the quality gates
Quality gates are basically acceptance criteria reviews that can be used throughout any project. Sure, managers of smaller, agile projects might say that this involves too much paperwork, but the nice thing about quality gates is that the strategy is fully customizable. It can be seen as a set of predefined quality criteria that a software development project must meet in order to proceed from one stage of its lifecycle to the next.
These are special milestone in a software project which are located before a phase that is strongly dependent on the outcome of a previous phase. They are especially useful between phases in which breaches in disciplines must be overcome.

How quality gates work:
You are not allowed to proceed the next gate until the previous gate has been completed successfully. It involves a checklist of deliverables, with some indication of the state of completion for each item. Checklist must be reviewed by the project manager (Manager) and a senior executive or stack-holders who is involved with the project. Quality gates therefore mean:

• Formal checklists are used throughout the life of a project.
• Formal sign-off and acceptance occurs at each gate.
• Assessment of the quality and integrity of the product takes place.
• Information is assured to be communicated to the correct stakeholders

Advantages of the Quality gates:
These are effective on any kind of project. There attractive because of the following advantages which includes:

• Minimizes project failure risks through phase-by-phase checklists (or Gates)
• Enables project managers to continuously communicate the process and build quality directly into the project
• Reduces development cycle time—getting it done right the first time
• Increases focus on a well-designed product

Now NDepend is equipped with this in v2017.1 and you will find default quality gates relative to technical debt and issues and issues, including Percentage of Debt, New Debt since Baseline or New Blocker / Critical / Major Issues. Quality gates relative to absolute technical debt value are disabled by default because the proper thresholds can only be defined in the context of a particular project.
Results of the applied rules are shown in the updated dashboard. This is quite new feature in NDepend for project management improvement.



You will find ratings and the status of passed rules.



HTML report has more details in a tabular format about the applied rules:


Then again the feature that I most like in NDepend is CQLinq which enables you to customize or add rules. CQLinq is much fast to run these rules and now much improved in case of performance.



There is a nice documentation is also available to know that how to Compute and Manage the Technical Debt with NDepend.