What Is an Excavate Score? A Practical Code Health Score for Technical Debt
Excavate Score
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7 min read
Zero-config. No account. No setup.
What's Your Excavate Score?
Excavate gives every repo a simple codebase health score, explains why it changed, and shows what to fix first before technical debt becomes roadmap debt.
Trusted by 1000+ developers.
0
Setup Required
100%
Local Analysis
MIT
Open Source
Nine Signals, One Score
The Excavate Score turns noisy engineering signals into one number your team can track every sprint.
Git Churn
Files that change too often become liabilities
25% weight
Coverage Gaps
Risky files without test safety net
25% weight
Complexity
Code that's hard to understand and maintain
20% weight
Knowledge Risk
Identifies files owned by too few people where knowledge leaves with one developer
Documentation Debt
Surfaces TODO, FIXME, HACK markers and low-comment areas needing attention
Temporal Coupling
Detects files that change together, revealing hidden dependencies and tight coupling
Orphan Files
Finds unused files that appear disconnected from the rest of the codebase
Dead Exports
Discovers exported code that nothing imports, eliminating unnecessary bloat
Dependency Risk
Identifies circular dependencies, stale packages, and known CVEs
Local-First Security
Your source code stays in your environment. Excavate analyzes locally so security reviews and procurement are easier.
Zero Data Transmission
No network calls. No telemetry. No tracking. Your code stays completely private and never leaves your device.
Local Analysis Engine
All computation runs on your machine. No cloud dependencies. Perfect for regulated industries and sensitive codebases.
Complete Transparency
Open source MIT license. Inspect the code. No hidden data collection. Audit exactly what's happening.
Compliance Ready
- ✓ HIPAA compliant (no data transmission)
- ✓ GDPR compliant (local processing only)
- ✓ SOC 2 friendly (air-gappable)
- ✓ Works offline completely
- ✓ No vendor lock-in
Git-Based Analysis
- ✓ Uses only local git history
- ✓ Requires existing repository
- ✓ No new accounts or services
- ✓ Minimal dependencies (Node.js only)
- ✓ Works in offline environments
How Your Excavate Score Is Calculated
A transparent scoring model built from git history, code structure, and ownership risk signals.
1
Parse Git History
Excavate reads your git commit history and file blame data to understand how your codebase has evolved. This reveals files that change frequently (high churn) and who owns each piece of code.
2
Analyze Code Structure
The engine scans your code for complexity metrics, dependencies, exports, and code patterns. It builds a dependency graph to identify circular imports, dead exports, and orphan files.
3
Detect Patterns
Temporal coupling analysis reveals files that change together. Documentation analysis finds TODOs, FIXMEs, and HALFs. Ownership risk identifies single-person bottlenecks.
4
Calculate Technical Debt Score
All signals are weighted and combined into a single debt score per file. High scores indicate files at highest risk of bugs, difficult to change, or close to knowledge loss.
5
Generate Beautiful Report
Output a self-contained HTML report with interactive D3 treemaps, sortable data tables, trend charts, and LLM prompts to understand and refactor your highest-risk files.
Why Teams Track Excavate Score
1
Works Out of the Box
No configuration files. No credentials. No servers. Just run npx excavate and start seeing your technical debt.
2
Your Code Stays Private
All analysis runs locally on your machine. No source code leaves your environment. No accounts. No internet required for core scanning.
3
Faster Than Opinions
Most tools show what your code looks like today. Excavate shows what your codebase has been struggling with over time, using git history and nine analysis signals.
4
Generate Shareable Reports
Create beautiful, self-contained HTML reports with D3 treemaps, sortable tables, trend charts, and copyable LLM prompts for each file.
Who Uses Excavate?
Engineering, platform, and leadership teams use Excavate Score to prioritize cleanup and reduce delivery risk.
Engineering Leads
Prioritize refactoring efforts, allocate resources to high-risk areas, and make data-driven technical decisions about where to invest.
Architects
Understand code organization risks, identify coupling patterns, discover orphan code, and plan refactoring roadmaps with confidence.
Compliance Teams
Run audits without leaving your network, generate compliance reports, identify knowledge risks, and maintain full code privacy.
DevOps & Release Teams
Assess release risk, understand which files are prone to bugs, identify complex areas needing extra testing, and prevent incidents.
What Teams Say
Feedback from teams using Excavate Score to make technical debt visible and actionable.
“
Excavate helped us find the exact files where hidden coupling was slowing every release.
”Staff Engineer, B2B SaaS Team
The Numbers Behind Excavate
The weighted metrics behind your Excavate Score and why it changes over time.
25%
Git Churn
File change frequency
25%
Test Coverage
Missing test safety
20%
Complexity
Cyclomatic complexity
10%
Knowledge Risk
Single-person files
10%
Coupling
Temporal dependencies
10%
Documentation
TODO/FIXME markers
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