Quantifies the economic value of developer productivity and the massive hidden costs of technical debt and maintenance inertia.
Software engineers act as global force-multipliers with the potential to raise global GDP by $3 trillion over ten years. However, the average developer spends 17.3 hours a week (over 40% of their time) dealing with maintenance issues such as debugging, refactoring, and addressing 'bad code,' which alone costs companies $85 billion in annual lost opportunity. Access to developer talent is now ranked by C-level executives as a greater threat to business success (61%) than access to capital (51%). Maintenance of legacy systems and technical debt are cited by 52% of developers as having a major negative impact on their personal morale and productivity.
Developers spend an average of 17.3 hours a week on maintenance issues... 13.5 hours on technical debt.
Risk Guard evaluates technical risk but does not calculate the 'Developer Productivity Loss' incurred by choosing a package with high technical debt.
Risk Guard would be better if it estimated the 'Maintenance Burden' (in developer hours) of a package relative to healthier alternatives.