VisMinerTD - An Open Source Tool to Support the Monitoring of the Technical Debt Evolution using Software Visualization

Thiago S. Mendes, Daniel A. Almeida, Nicolli S. R. Alves, Rodrigo O. Spínola, Renato Novais, Manoel Mendonça

2015

Abstract

Software development and maintenance activities can be negatively impacted by the presence of technical debt. One of its consequences is the software quality decrease. In order to produce better software, the evolution of technical debt needs to be monitored. However, this is not a trivial task since it usually requires the analysis of large amount of data and different types of debt. The areas of metrics and software visualization can be used to facilitate the monitoring of technical debt. This paper presents an open source tool called VisMinerTD that uses software metrics and visualization to support developers in software comprehension activities including the identification and monitoring of technical debt. VisMinerTD brings a new perspective to the hard work of identifying and monitoring technical debt evolution on software projects. Moreover, the user can easily plug new metrics and new visual metaphors to address specific technical debt identification and monitoring activities.

References

  1. Alves, N. S. R., Ribeiro, L. F., Caires, V.; Mendes, T. S., Spínola, R.O., 2014. Towards an Ontology of Terms on Technical Debt. In Sixth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, Victoria, British Columbia. Canada. DOI: 10.1109/MTD.2014.9.
  2. Chen, C., 2004. Information Visualization - Beyond the Horizon, 2nd edition. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York.
  3. D3.js, 2015. Available in http://d3js.org.
  4. Diehl S., 2007. Software Visualization: Visualizing the Structure, Behaviour, and Evolution of Software. Springer-Verlag, New York, Inc.
  5. Fjeldstad, R., Hamlen, W., 1983. Application program maintenance: Report to our respondents. Tutorial on Software Maintenance, Parikh, G. & Zvegintzov, N. (Eds.). IEEE Computer Soc. Press., pp. 13-27.
  6. Guo, Y., Spínola, R.O., Seaman, C., 2014. Exploring the costs of technical debt management - a case study. Empirical Software Engineering Journal, v.1, p.1 - 24. DOI:10.1007/s10664-014-9351-7.
  7. Google Chart Tools, 2015. Available in https://developers.google.com/chart.
  8. High Charts, 2015. Available in http://www.highcharts.com.
  9. Izurieta, C.; Vetro, A.; Zazworka, N.; Cai, Y.; Seaman, C. & Shull, F. 2012, Organizing the technical debt landscape, In Third International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, pp. 23-26.
  10. JGit, 2015. Available in http://www.jgit.org/.
  11. Kohsuke, 2015.Available in http://github-api.kohsuke.org.
  12. Kruchten, P., Nord, R. L., Ozkaya, I., 2012. Technical Debt: From Metaphor to Theory and Practice, In IEEE Software, Published by the IEEE Computer Society.
  13. Lehman, M. M., Belady, L. A., 1985. Eds., Program evolution: processes of software change. Academic Press Professional, Inc.
  14. Lientz, P., Swanson, E.B., Tompkins, G.E., 1978. Characteristics of Application Software Maintenance. Communications of the ACM, vol. 21, p. 6.
  15. Novais, R., Nunes, C., Lima, C., Cirilo, E., Dantas, F., Garcia, A.; Mendonca, M., 2012. On the proactive and interactive visualization for feature evolution comprehension: An industrial investigation, In 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pp.1044,1053.
  16. Novais, R. L., Torres, A., Mendes T. S., Mendonca, M. Zazworka, N., 2013. Software evolution visualization: A systematic mapping study. IST, 55(11):1860 - 1883.
  17. Novais, R. L., Nunes, C., Garcia, A., Mendonca, M., 2013b. SourceMiner Evolution: A Tool for Supporting Feature Evolution Comprehension, In 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), pp.508,511, 22-28.
  18. Parnas, D. L., 1994. Software Aging. In 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, Sorrento, Italy.
  19. Seaman, C., Guo, Y., 2011. Measuring and Monitoring Technical Debt. Advances in Computers 82, pp. 25-46.
  20. Spínola, R. O., Zazworka, N., Vetro, A., Seaman, C., Shull, F., 2013. Investigating Technical Debt Folklore. In Fourth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, San Francisco. DOI: 10.1109/MTD.2013.6608671.
  21. Storey, M. D., Cubranic, D., German, D. M., 2005. On the use of visualization to support awareness of human activities in software development: a survey and a framework. In ACM Symposium on Software Visualization. ACM, New York, pp. 193-202.
  22. VisMiner Site, 2015. Available in http://visminer.wordpress.com.
  23. VisMiner Wiki, 2015. Available in http://github.com/visminer/Visminer/wiki/Installation.
  24. VisMinerTD GIT repository, 2015. Available in https://github.com/visminer/.
  25. Zazworka, N., Spínola, R. O., Vetró, A., Shull, F., Seaman, C., 2013. A Case Study on Effectively Identifying Technical Debt. In 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, Porto de Galinhas. DOI: 10.1145/2460999.2461005.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

S. Mendes T., A. Almeida D., S. R. Alves N., O. Spínola R., Novais R. and Mendonça M. (2015). VisMinerTD - An Open Source Tool to Support the Monitoring of the Technical Debt Evolution using Software Visualization . In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-097-0, pages 457-462. DOI: 10.5220/0005464804570462


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis15,
author={Thiago S. Mendes and Daniel A. Almeida and Nicolli S. R. Alves and Rodrigo O. Spínola and Renato Novais and Manoel Mendonça},
title={VisMinerTD - An Open Source Tool to Support the Monitoring of the Technical Debt Evolution using Software Visualization},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,},
year={2015},
pages={457-462},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005464804570462},
isbn={978-989-758-097-0},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,
TI - VisMinerTD - An Open Source Tool to Support the Monitoring of the Technical Debt Evolution using Software Visualization
SN - 978-989-758-097-0
AU - S. Mendes T.
AU - A. Almeida D.
AU - S. R. Alves N.
AU - O. Spínola R.
AU - Novais R.
AU - Mendonça M.
PY - 2015
SP - 457
EP - 462
DO - 10.5220/0005464804570462