| name | code-quality-scoring |
| description | Vendor-neutral framework for scoring software health, estimating technical debt, assessing cloud readiness and open-source safety, and communicating quality to business stakeholders. Use when you need to quantify code health at the application or portfolio level rather than fix individual findings. |
| user-invocable | false |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| updated | 2026-06-15 |
| category | universal |
| author | bobmatnyc |
| license | Apache-2.0 |
| progressive_disclosure | {"entry_point":{"summary":"Score software health (Resiliency + Agility + Elegance), estimate technical debt, assess cloud readiness and open-source safety, and frame all of it for business stakeholders","when_to_use":"When assessing a whole codebase for health/debt/cloud-readiness, prioritizing remediation across a portfolio, or translating quality metrics into business language — not when fixing a single lint finding","quick_start":"1. Compute Software Health as the average of Resiliency, Agility, Elegance sub-scores 2. Apply the red/orange/green bands 3. Convert violation density into an effort-to-fix estimate 4. Weight by business impact to prioritize 5. Present using the stakeholder framing in quality-communication-guide.md"},"references":["software-health-framework.md","technical-debt-estimation.md","cloud-maturity.md","open-source-safety.md","quality-communication-guide.md"]} |
| context_limit | 800 |
| tags | ["code-quality","software-health","technical-debt","cloud-readiness","open-source-safety","metrics","portfolio"] |
| requires_tools | [] |
Code Quality Scoring
A vendor-neutral framework for quantifying and communicating software quality at the
application and portfolio level. Most quality skills tell you how to fix one finding;
this skill tells you how to score an entire codebase, estimate the cost of its debt,
and explain both to people who do not read code.
Source note: The scoring frameworks below are derived from CAST Highlight's code
quality indicators and methodology (https://doc.casthighlight.com/). They are
paraphrased and re-expressed as a vendor-neutral model. Threshold bands and
debt-density figures are CAST's proprietary calibration from their AppMarq benchmark
dataset; they are presented here as attributed reference ranges, not as universal
standards. Where CAST defers to open standards (COCOMO II for effort, SPDX/choosealicense
for licenses, CWE/CVE for security), cite those primary sources.
When to Use This Skill
Use it when the question is "how healthy is this codebase, and what should we do
first?" — for example:
- Onboarding to an unfamiliar codebase and needing a health baseline.
- Deciding whether to refactor, rewrite, or retire an application.
- Prioritizing remediation across many applications (a portfolio).
- Estimating the effort/cost a backlog of quality defects represents.
- Presenting a quality/debt position to a manager, product owner, or executive.
Do not reach for it to fix a single defect — for that, use the language-specific
quality skills (Python/Java/PHP/TS quality anti-patterns) and code-review-standards.
Core Concept 1 — Software Health is a composite
Treat overall code health as the straight average of three independent dimensions, each
scored 0–100. This decomposition (derived from CAST Highlight) is useful because each
dimension maps to a different class of fix and a different stakeholder concern:
| Dimension | A.k.a. | Measures | Maps to checklist family |
|---|
| Resiliency / Robustness | Software Resiliency | Will it break in production? Error handling, defensive coding, reliability | Robustness, Security |
| Agility / Changeability | Software Agility | Can a team understand and change it quickly? Documentation, readability, naming | Changeability, Transferability |
