Risk Score

Embold Risk Score

What is Embold Risk Score?

The Embold risk score signifies the urgency of addressing the quality problem as a priority. The Embold risk score ranges from 5 to 1, where 5 represents high risk and 1 represents low risk.

How is the Embold Risk score calculated?

To calculate the risk score Embold considers the frequency of changes, the number of issues, and the severity of issue tickets raised against a specific component (or class).

For Version Control System only, the risk score is calculated from the number of commits weighted by the age of each commit. The more recent a commit is, the higher the impact on the risk score. Each commit and its age will be calculated.
Example: A file with 20 commits, all in the last month, has a higher risk than a file with 20 commits a year ago.

If the Embold is integrated with the ticketing system then more data is available. To calculate the risk score, at the time of scanning Embold considers all the tickets that had committed to the file. The impact on the risk score is based on the criticality of the ticket.
Example: A year-old Blocker Bug will create more Risk than a one-month-old Trivial Feature. In this equation, time is no factor because the criticality still applies, if the ticket hasn’t been deleted.

Why refactoring is important while calculating the risk score?

If a bad code is not modified frequently, it has a smaller impact on the overall system. The rule of thumb is: if you modify a file more than five times, refactor it to obtain an average positive return on investment. Learning from the Version Control System and Jira history of each file, with risk score Embold determines where the code has a higher possibility of changes and its importance on the overall system.