Software maintainability is essential for long-term success in the software industry. Despite widespread evidence of the high costs associated with poor maintainability, market pressure drives many organizations to prioritize short-term releases. This focus leads to accumulating technical debt worldwide. In this preliminary work, we propose maintainability gamification through anonymous leaderboards to encourage organizations to maintain a sustained focus on code quality. Our approach envisions benchmarking to foster motivation and urgency across companies by highlighting thresholds for leaders and laggards. To initiate this concept, we analyze a sample of over 1,000 proprietary projects using CodeHealth scores. By examining the distribution of these scores across various dimensions, we assess the feasibility of creating effective leaderboards. Findings from this study offer valuable insights for future design activities in maintainability gamification.

翻译：软件可维护性对软件产业的长期成功至关重要。尽管大量证据表明低可维护性会带来高昂成本，市场压力仍驱使许多组织优先考虑短期发布。这种关注焦点导致全球范围内技术债务不断累积。在这项初步工作中，我们提出通过匿名排行榜实现可维护性游戏化，以激励组织持续关注代码质量。我们的方法设想通过设定领先者与落后者阈值进行基准测试，从而激发企业间的竞争动力与紧迫感。为启动这一概念，我们使用CodeHealth评分分析了超过1000个专有项目样本。通过考察这些评分在不同维度的分布情况，我们评估了创建有效排行榜的可行性。本研究结果为未来可维护性游戏化的设计活动提供了重要见解。