Technical Debt Indexes Provided by Tools: A Preliminary Discussion

Fontana, Francesca Arcelli; Roveda, Riccardo; Zanoni, Marco

doi:10.1109/mtd.2016.11

Cited by 30 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Moreover, we aim to define a new technical debt index more focused on architectural issues [14]. We currently detect only three AS, we are interested to detect other architectural smells, also not strictly related to dependency issues and include a new component devoted to the suggestion of the refactoring steps to remove the architectural smells, since their refactoring could be a critical task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arcan: A Tool for Architectural Smells Detection

Fontana

Pigazzini

Roveda

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW)

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Abstract-Code smells are sub-optimal coding circumstances such as blob classes or spaghetti code -they have received much attention and tooling in recent software engineering research. Higher-up in the abstraction level, architectural smells are problems or sub-optimal architectural patterns or other design-level characteristics. These have received significantly less attention even though they are usually considered more critical than code smells, and harder to detect, remove, and refactor. This paper describes an open-source tool called Arcan developed for the detection of architectural smells through an evaluation of several architecture dependency issues. The detection techniques inside Arcan exploit graph database technology, allowing for high scalability in smells detection and better management of large amounts of dependencies of multiple kinds. In the scope of this paper, we focus on the evaluation of Arcan results carried out with real-life software developers to check if the architectural smells detected by Arcan are really perceived as problems and to get an overall usefulness evaluation of the tool.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arcan: A Tool for Architectural Smells Detection

Fontana

Pigazzini

Roveda

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW)

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“…Different quality or technical debt indexes have been defined in the literature to evaluate a project, as the old Maintainability Index of Coleman [14]. We briefly cite below the indexes provided by some tools, while a more extended description of some of them can be found in [7].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different tools for software analysis, in particular commercial ones, provide a large number of evaluation measures through the computation of several metrics and technical debt indexes. In a previous paper [7], we briefly described five tools (SonarGraph, Structure101, Cast, InFusion, SonarQube) able to provide a Technical Debt Index, sometimes called in a different way, but with the same or similar purpose. We found that often architectural issues are not taken into account and when they are considered the main focus is on the detection of cyclic dependencies [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an Architectural Debt Index

Roveda

Fontana

Pigazzini

et al. 2018

2018 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)

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Different indexes have been proposed to evaluate software quality and technical debt. Usually these indexes take into account different code level issues and several metrics, well known software metrics or new ones defined ad hoc for a specific purpose. In this paper we propose and define a new index, more oriented to the evaluation of architectural violations. We describe in detail the index, called Architectural Debt Index, that we integrated in a tool developed for architectural smell detection. The index is based on the detection of architectural smells, their criticality and their history. Currently only dependency architectural smells have been considered, but other architectural debt indicators can be considered and integrated in the index computation.

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“…There is a large volume of potential metrics and techniques that have not been used yet for estimating TD, and which could potentially increase the completeness of the TD estimation concept. In addition, most of the already existing tools provide different TD indexes [63], creating confusion in the community about which of the current metrics should be selected, or how they should be combined [64].…”

Section: Open Issues and Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods and Tools for TD Estimation and Forecasting: A State-of-the-art Survey

Tsoukalas

Siavvas

Janković

et al. 2018

2018 International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS)

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Technical debt (TD), a metaphor inspired by the financial debt of economic theory, indicates quality compromises that can yield short-term benefits in the software development process, but may negatively affect the long-term quality of software products. Numerous techniques, methods, and tools have been proposed over the years for estimating and managing TD, providing a variety of options to the developers and project managers of software applications. However, apart from managing TD, predicting its future value is equally important since this knowledge is expected to facilitate decision-making tasks regarding software implementation and maintenance, such as incurring or paying off TD instances. To this end, the purpose of the present study is to (i) summarize the work that has been conducted until today in the field of TD estimation and forecasting, and (ii) to identify existing open issues that have not been adequately addressed yet and require further research. The present survey led to two interesting observations. Firstly, none of the existing TD estimation methods and tools has reached a desired level of maturity, while a large volume of previously uninvestigated metrics and techniques exist that could potentially increase the completeness of TD estimation. Secondly, no notable contributions exist in the field of TD forecasting, indicating that it is a scarcely investigated field. The latter constitutes the main finding of the present literature review, since TD forecasting could lead to the development of practical decision-making mechanisms, which could assist developers and project managers in taking proactive actions regarding TD repayment.

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Technical Debt Indexes Provided by Tools: A Preliminary Discussion

Cited by 30 publications

References 5 publications

Arcan: A Tool for Architectural Smells Detection

Arcan: A Tool for Architectural Smells Detection

Towards an Architectural Debt Index

Methods and Tools for TD Estimation and Forecasting: A State-of-the-art Survey

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