DriftScore is Vibgrate's single 0-100 measure of upgrade drift, where lower is healthier. This article explains how to read the number, what the risk bands mean, and how to use a score to decide what to do next. It's written for developers triaging a scan and for leaders comparing repositories.
Overview
A DriftScore condenses many signals — outdated dependencies, end-of-life runtimes, deprecations, and breaking-change exposure — into one comparable number. Because it is normalized to 0-100, you can compare a small service against a large monolith and track a single repo over time.
Get a score by scanning from your project root:
vg
Reading the bands
Treat the score as a band, not a precise grade. Roughly:
- Low (healthy) — drift is minor and routine. Keep doing regular maintenance.
- Moderate — drift is building. Schedule upgrades before it compounds.
- High — meaningful risk. Plan focused upgrade work soon; some dependencies or runtimes may be near or past support.
- Severe — urgent. Expect painful upgrades, unsupported runtimes, or unpatched security exposure.
The exact thresholds and contributing breakdown are shown in the scan output and explained in the Upgrade DriftScore reference. Use the breakdown to see which factors put you in a given band.
Score in context
A number alone is not a verdict. Consider:
- Direction — is the score trending up or down across scans? A stable moderate score is healthier than a rising low one.
- Composition — two repos with the same score can have very different problems; one may be a single end-of-life runtime, another a long tail of outdated packages.
- Criticality — drift on a customer-facing service matters more than on an internal tool.
Don't chase a perfect zero
Zero is rarely the right goal. Some drift is normal and healthy churn. The aim is to keep the score in a band you've agreed is acceptable, and to act before it climbs. Drift budgets let you encode that target as a CI gate.
Using the score to act
vg report
Generate a human-readable report to share the score and its breakdown with your team, then prioritize the factors contributing most.
Related
- See What drives DriftScore up and down.
- See Drift budgets explained to turn a target band into a CI gate.