On the Temporality of Introducing Code Technical Debt
Code Technical Debt (TD) is intentionally or unintentionally created when developers introduce inefficiencies in the codebase. This can be attributed to various reasons such as heavy work-load, tight delivery schedule, unawareness of good practices, etc.
- PDF / 754,213 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 86 Downloads / 178 Views
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands [email protected], [email protected] 2 Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece {a.ampatzoglou,achat}@uom.edu.gr
Abstract. Code Technical Debt (TD) is intentionally or unintentionally created when developers introduce inefficiencies in the codebase. This can be attributed to various reasons such as heavy work-load, tight delivery schedule, unawareness of good practices, etc. To shed light into the context that leads to technical debt accumulation, in this paper we investigate: (a) the temporality of code technical debt introduction in new methods, i.e., whether the introduction of technical debt is stable across the lifespan of the project, or if its evolution presents spikes; and (b) the relation of technical debt introduction and the development team’s workload in a given period. To answer these questions, we perform a case study on twenty-seven Apache projects, and inspect the number of Technical Debt Items introduced in 6-month sliding temporal windows. The results of the study suggest that: (a) overall, the number of Technical Debt Items introduced through new code is a stable metric, although it presents some spikes; and (b) the number of commits performed is not strongly correlated to the number of introduced Technical Debt Items. Keywords: Technical debt temporality debt · Metrics fluctuation
1
· Case study · New code
Introduction
Technical debt (TD) at the code level refers to inefficiencies introduced in the source code of an application during the implementation or the maintenance phase [1]. These inefficiencies manifest themselves as violations of coding standards, complex and hard to understand code, code duplicates, etc. [2]. According to Alves et al. [3] code TD is the most studied type of technical debt, and based on Ampatzoglou et al. [4] it is one of the most important in industry. There has been significant work on how code TD evolves and how it accumulates over time. However, existing studies have looked at TD evolution as a whole, without distinguishing between technical debt that is added as new code, c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Shepperd et al. (Eds.): QUATIC 2020, CCIS 1266, pp. 68–82, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58793-2_6
On the Temporality of Introducing Code Technical Debt
69
and technical debt that is added or modified in existing code. In this paper, we focus only on the introduction of new code TD, i.e. TD inserted in the system in the form of new Technical Debt Items (TDIs). More specifically we study new methods (our scope is object-oriented systems) that contain TD and we look at the introduction of this type of new TD as a temporal phenomenon. Focusing on TD that is introduced by new code, as opposed to TD that is introduced by modifying existing code, can provide a unique insight. Specifically, the new TDIs introduced by new methods at each commit (either new methods in existing classes or new methods in entirely new classes) re
Data Loading...
