NDLI: Comparing four approaches for technical debt identification

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Comparing four approaches for technical debt identification

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Zazworka, Nico Vetro’, Antonio Izurieta, Clemente Wong, Sunny Cai, Yuanfang Seaman, Carolyn Shull, Forrest
Copyright Year	2013
Abstract	Software systems accumulate technical debt (TD) when short-term goals in software development are traded for long-term goals (e.g., quick-and-dirty implementation to reach a release date versus a well-refactored implementation that supports the long-term health of the project). Some forms of TD accumulate over time in the form of source code that is difficult to work with and exhibits a variety of anomalies. A number of source code analysis techniques and tools have been proposed to potentially identify the code-level debt accumulated in a system. What has not yet been studied is if using multiple tools to detect TD can lead to benefits, that is, if different tools will flag the same or different source code components. Further, these techniques also lack investigation into the symptoms of TD “interest” that they lead to. To address this latter question, we also investigated whether TD, as identified by the source code analysis techniques, correlates with interest payments in the form of increased defect- and change-proneness. Comparing the results of different TD identification approaches to understand their commonalities and differences and to evaluate their relationship to indicators of future TD “interest.” We selected four different TD identification techniques (code smells, automatic static analysis issues, grime buildup, and Modularity violations) and applied them to 13 versions of the Apache Hadoop open source software project. We collected and aggregated statistical measures to investigate whether the different techniques identified TD indicators in the same or different classes and whether those classes in turn exhibited high interest (in the form of a large number of defects and higher change-proneness). The outputs of the four approaches have very little overlap and are therefore pointing to different problems in the source code. Dispersed Coupling and Modularity violations were co-located in classes with higher defect-proneness. We also observed a strong relationship between Modularity violations and change-proneness. Our main contribution is an initial overview of the TD landscape, showing that different TD techniques are loosely coupled and therefore indicate problems in different locations of the source code. Moreover, our proxy interest indicators (change- and defect-proneness) correlate with only a small subset of TD indicators.
Starting Page	403
Ending Page	426
Page Count	24
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09639314
Journal	Software Quality Journal
Volume Number	22
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	15731367
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2013-04-03
Publisher Place	Boston
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Technical debt Software maintenance Software quality Source code analysis Modularity violations Grime Code smells ASA Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems Programming Languages, Compilers, Interpreters Data Structures, Cryptology and Information Theory Operating Systems
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality Media Technology Software

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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