Technical Debt Tools: A Systematic Mapping Study

2016

Springer Science+Business Media New York 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

XX Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality

Context: It is common for a software project to incur technical debt (TD) during its development. It can impact several artifacts produced throughout the software development process. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out management actions to find a balance between the benefits of incurring it and the effects of its presence. However, so far, much of the attention has been given only to discussions relating TD to coding issues. This is a worrying scenario because other types of debt can also have impactful, or even worse, consequences on projects. Aims: This study elaborates on the need to consider other issues of the development process and not just the source-code when investigating the TD phenomenon. Method: We analyze responses from 653 practitioners concerning TD causes, effects, prevention, reasons for nonprevention, repayment, and reasons for non-repayment and investigate whether these TD management elements are related to coding or to other software development issues. Results: Coding issues are commonly related to the investigated elements but, indeed, they are only part of the big picture we draw. Issues related to the project planning and management, human factors, knowledge, quality, process, requirements, verification, validation, and test, design, architecture, TD management, and the organization are also common. Lastly, we present a hump diagram that, in combination with the detailed results, provides guidance on what to expect from the presence of TD and how to react to it considering several issues of software development. Conclusion: The results shed light on other concerns beyond code that the research community and practitioners need to be aware of.

Software Quality Journal, 2013

Background: 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 vs. 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, i.e. 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 defectand change-proneness.

Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2016

The term Technical Debt (TD) is used to describe the debt that a development team incurs when it takes shortcuts in the software development process, but that may increase the complexity and maintenance cost in the long-term. If a development team does not manage TD, this debt can cause significant long-term problems such as high maintenance costs. An important goal of the management of the debt is to evaluate the appropriate time to pay a TD item and to effectively apply decision-making criteria to balance the shortterm benefits against long-term costs. However, although there are different studies that have proposed strategies for the management of TD, decision criteria are often discussed in the background and, sometimes, they are not even mentioned. Thus, the purpose of this work is to identify, by performing a systematic mapping study of the literature, decision-making criteria that have been proposed to support the management of TD. We identified 14 decision-making criteria that can be used by development teams to prioritize the payment of TD items and a list of types of debt related to the criteria. In addition, the results show possible gaps where further research may be performed.

Advances in Software Engineering, 2015

Technical debt (TD) is an emergent area that has stimulated academic concern. Managers must have information about debt in order to balance time-to-market advantages and issues of TD. In addition, managers must have information about TD to plan payments. Development tasks such as designing, coding, and testing generate different sorts of TD, each one with specific information. Moreover, literature review pointed out a gap in identifying and accurately cataloging technical debt. It is possible to find tools that can identify technical debt, but there is not a described solution that supports cataloging all types of debt. This paper presents an approach to create an integrated catalog of technical debts from different software development tasks. The approach allows tabulating and managing TD properties in order to support managers in the decision process. It also allows managers to track TD. The approach is implemented by TD-Tracker tool, which can integrate different TD identification tools and import identified debts. We present integrations between TD-Tracker and two external tools, used to identify potential technical debts. As part of the approach, we describe how to map the relationship between TD-Tracker and the external tools. We also show how to manage external information within TD-Tracker.

Proceedings of the XP2017 Scientific Workshops, 2017

Welcome to the Ninth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, collocated with the 18th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP 2017) in Cologne. The technical debt research community continues to expand through collaborations of industry, tool vendors, and academia. The main topic of this year's workshop was on the impact of agile development approaches towards the management of technical debt.

Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGSOFT Conference on Quality of Software Architectures, 2015

Technical debt has been the subject of numerous studies over the last few years. To date, most of the research has concentrated on management (detection, quantification, and decision making) approaches-most performed at code and implementation levels through various static analysis tools. However, if practitioners are to adopt model driven techniques, then the management of technical debt also requires that we address this problem during the specification and architectural phases. This position paper discusses several questions that need to be addressed in order to improve the quality of software architecture by exploring the management of technical debt during modeling, and suggests various lines of research that are worthwhile subjects for further investigation.

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor of bad software design or immature artifacts of a software system. The metaphor has been quite intensively researched especially on how to identify the TD symptoms, (e.g., system deficiencies or architecture violations) explicitly. Although the TD identification is quite important in the TD management process, a systematic management of TD and how to reduce it should also be considered important in each release of the development project. Otherwise, the software becomes more and more unmaintainable. In this paper, we introduce a framework to manage and reduce the TD of software systems. As it is based on quantification and a cost-benefit analysis, it is called Cost-Benefit based Technical Debt Management (CoBeTDM). CoBeTDM defines explicit phases focusing on the most important aspects of TD management: identification, monitoring, and prioritization. Overall, CoBeTDM should support managers to take the right decisions regarding the software evolution and the reduction of the collected TD at the right time.

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 2019

Technical debt (TD) contextualizes problems faced during software evolution considering the tasks that are not carried out adequately during software development. Software TD is a type of debt that brings a short-term benefit, but which may have to be paid with interest later on in the software development life cycle. Its presence brings risks to the project and can reduce its quality. It is worthwhile to have automatic mechanisms to monitor it, as TD monitoring requires the analysis of large amounts of complex data. Therefore, the combination of software metrics and code comment analysis, in the identification, and information visualization techniques, in monitoring, present themselves as a promising strategy to manage TD. This work presents VisminerTD, a tool that allows the automatic identification and interactive monitoring of the evolution of TD items by combining software metrics, code comment analysis, and information visualization. To evaluate its applicability, a feasibility study was carried out considering JUnit 4 and Apache Ant software projects. The results indicated that VisminerTD can support software development teams in monitoring TD items. In addition, a second case study was performed to assess the feasibility of the proposed tool regarding its usefulness, ease of use, and self-predicted future use. The results provided positive evidence on the use of the proposed tool, indicating (i) that it can be useful in supporting TD Identification and TD monitoring activities and (ii) that it can bring gains in terms of comprehensiveness and efficacy when evaluating the desirable time to identify and monitor different types of debt. Given the current scenario characterized by limited options of tools that combine different information to support automatic identification and monitoring of the evolution of TD items in software projects, VisminerTD can approximate the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice in the TD area, contributing to a wider dissemination of the concept.

Technical debt, a metaphor for the long-term consequences of weak software development, must be managed to keep it under control. The main goal of this article is to identify and analyze the elements required to manage technical debt.