Scoring

Every scan produces a 0-100 health score alongside a label:

Penalty per diagnostic

Each diagnostic adds a penalty based on its severity:

The curve

The penalties are summed, then the score is computed as an asymptotic decay curve rather than a simple subtraction:

score = round(100 * e^(-penalty / K))   // K = 70

A perfect project (no diagnostics) always scores exactly 100. As penalty increases, the score keeps decreasing — it approaches 0 but never gets stuck there, so the score stays meaningful (and can still register improvement) even on projects with a lot of findings.

K = 70 was chosen so a single warning (penalty 4) still lands around 94 — comfortably inside the Excellent bucket — while errors and repeated warnings continue to meaningfully erode the score. The previous K = 40 pushed a single warning down to ~90, right on the Excellent/Good boundary — too harsh a penalty for one warning.

The old max(0, 100 - penalty) formula saturated at 0 once penalty reached 100 (about 10 errors), making a messy project and a catastrophic one indistinguishable, and the score could never register a fix. The exponential curve stays monotonic and responsive across the whole range instead.

Using the score in CI

npx @docker-doctor/cli@latest . --score

Prints only the numeric score and exits non-zero if it's below 50 — useful as a lightweight CI gate alongside the default scan's error-based exit code.