Title
Technical Debt Principal Assessment Through Structural Metrics
Abstract
One of the first steps towards the effective Technical Debt (TD) management is the quantification and continuous monitoring of the TD principal. In the current state-ofresearch and practice the most common ways to assess TD principal are the use of: (a) structural proxies—i.e., most commonly through quality metrics; and (b) monetized proxies—i.e., most commonly through the use of the SQALE (Software Quality Assessment based on Lifecycle Expectations) method. Although both approaches have merit, they seem to rely on different viewpoints of TD and their levels of agreement have not been evaluated so far. Therefore, in this paper, we empirically explore this relation by analyzing data obtained from 20 open source software projects and build a regression model that establishes a relationship between them. The results of the study suggest that a model of seven structural metrics, quantifying different aspects of quality (i.e., coupling, cohesion, complexity, size, and inheritance) can accurately estimate TD principal as appraised by SonarQube. The results of this case study are useful to both academia and industry. In particular, academia can gain knowledge on: (a) the reliability and agreement of TD principal assessment methods and (b) the structural characteristics of software that contribute to the accumulation of TD, whereas practitioners are provided with an alternative evaluation model with reduced number of parameters that can accurately assess TD, through traditional software quality metrics and tools.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/SEAA.2017.59
2017 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)
Keywords
Field
DocType
technical debt,prediction model,case study
Systems engineering,Regression analysis,Computer science,Viewpoints,Software,Technical debt,Software metric,Software quality,SQALE,Information and Computer Science
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-2142-4
1
0.35
References 
Authors
14
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Makrina Viola Kosti1303.30
Apostolos Ampatzoglou233441.24
Alexander Chatzigeorgiou379060.13
G. D. Pallas411.03
Ioannis Stamelos5124391.67
Lefteris Angelis6129682.51