Add an ability to set a default effort for external issues. This will give a better view of the maintainability rating when there are a lot of external issues imported. Currently external issues are reported as a 0 effort, causing the technical debt to be reported lower than it actually is.
Depending on how it’s currently implemented, this can be a system configuration setting that is only read on startup of the server and used for all the calculations, avoiding to constantly recalculate the technical debt. This can include a warning that changing it after there are already analysis in the system can cause
- incorrect display
- changes in old reports
- quality gate will not fail due to no calculated difference before and after even though you go from A to E overnight.
Using this as a configuration setting means that only administrators can change it and they would have to consider the possible consequences. It also means that this is an option only for local installations, not for SonarCloud.
Otherwise a setting per project that is used for newly imported issues and optionally a button to recalculate the existing issues (if this is resource intensive to do on the fly).