Technical Debt Tools: A Systematic Mapping Study

Diego Saraiva, José Neto, Uirá Kulesza, Guilherme Freitas, Rodrigo Reboucas, Roberta Coelho

2021

Abstract

Context: The concept of technical debt is a metaphor that contextualizes problems faced during software evolution that reflect technical compromises in tasks that are not carried out adequately during their development - they can yield short-term benefit to the project in terms of increased productivity and lower cost, but that may have to be paid off with interest later. Objective: This work investigates the current state of the art of technical debt tools by identifying which activities, functionalities and kind of technical debt are handled by existing tools that support the technical debt management in software projects. Method: A systematic mapping study is performed to identify and analyze available tools for managing technical debt based on a set of five research questions. Results: The work contributes with (i) a systematic mappping of current research on the field, (ii) a highlight of the most referenced tools, their main characteristics, their supported technical debt types and activities, and (iii) a discussion of emerging findings and implications for future research. Conclusions: Our study identified 50 TD tools where 42 of them are new tools, and 8 tools extend an existing one. Most of the tools address technical debt related to code, design, and/or architecture artifacts. Besides, the different TD management activities received different levels of attention. For example, TD identification is supported by 80% of the tools, whereas 30% of them handle the TD documentation activity. Tools that deal with TD identification and measurement activities are still predominant. However, we observed that recent tools focusing on TD prevention, replacement, and prioritization activities represent emergent research trends.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Saraiva D., Neto J., Kulesza U., Freitas G., Reboucas R. and Coelho R. (2021). Technical Debt Tools: A Systematic Mapping Study. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-509-8, pages 88-98. DOI: 10.5220/0010459100880098

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis21,
author={Diego Saraiva and José Neto and Uirá Kulesza and Guilherme Freitas and Rodrigo Reboucas and Roberta Coelho},
title={Technical Debt Tools: A Systematic Mapping Study},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,},
year={2021},
pages={88-98},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010459100880098},
isbn={978-989-758-509-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,
TI - Technical Debt Tools: A Systematic Mapping Study
SN - 978-989-758-509-8
AU - Saraiva D.
AU - Neto J.
AU - Kulesza U.
AU - Freitas G.
AU - Reboucas R.
AU - Coelho R.
PY - 2021
SP - 88
EP - 98
DO - 10.5220/0010459100880098