Characterizing Technical Debt in Evolving Open-source Software

Arthur-Jozsef Molnar, Simona Motogna

2022

Abstract

Technical debt represents deficiencies in software design or implementation often caused by prioritizing feature development over fixing existing issues. Like its financial counterpart, technical debt comprises a principal and an interest. Not addressing it in time leads to development crises, where focus and resources must be shifted to address existing issues. Existing software tools allow measuring the level of debt and pinpointing its sources, which can help practitioners control it. In the present paper we aim to investigate the prevalence, characteristics, and evolution of technical debt in several open-source applications. We used SonarQube to study 112 application versions that covered more than 15 years of development for each application. We studied the way debt characteristics and source code distribution evolved over the target applications’ lifecycles. We addressed concerns regarding the accuracy of the analysis and illustrated some of the limitations of existing tools. We observed that a small number of issue types were responsible for most of the debt. We found that each application had its own technical debt particularities. As future work, we aim to expand our selection of analysis tools, leverage open data sets, and extend our investigation to other systems and types of software.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Molnar A. and Motogna S. (2022). Characterizing Technical Debt in Evolving Open-source Software. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-568-5, pages 174-185. DOI: 10.5220/0011073600003176

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase22,
author={Arthur-Jozsef Molnar and Simona Motogna},
title={Characterizing Technical Debt in Evolving Open-source Software},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2022},
pages={174-185},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011073600003176},
isbn={978-989-758-568-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Characterizing Technical Debt in Evolving Open-source Software
SN - 978-989-758-568-5
AU - Molnar A.
AU - Motogna S.
PY - 2022
SP - 174
EP - 185
DO - 10.5220/0011073600003176