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The temporality of technical debt introduction on new code and confounding factors

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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 workload, tight delivery schedule, or developers’ lack of experience. Since a software system grows mostly through the addition of new code, it is interesting to study how TD fluctuates along this process. Specifically, in this paper, we investigate: (a) the temporality of code TD introduction in new code, i.e., whether the introduction of TD is stable across the lifespan of the project, or if its evolution presents spikes; and (b) the relation of TD introduction to the development team’s workload in a given period, as well as to the experience of the development team. To answer these questions, we have performed a case study on 47 open-source projects from two well-known ecosystems (Apache and Eclipse) as well as additional isolated projects from GitHub (not selected from a specific ecosystem) and inspected the number of TD issues introduced in 6-month sliding temporal windows. The results of the study suggested that: (a) overall, the number of TD issues introduced through new code is a stable measure, although it presents spikes; and (b) the number of commits performed, as well as developers’ experience are not strongly correlated to the number of introduced TD issues.

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Notes

  1. http://www.td-survey.com/

  2. https://rules.sonarsource.com/

  3. https://www.zenodo.org/record/5082041

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

    George Digkas & Paris Avgeriou

  2. Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Macedonia, Greece

    Apostolos Ampatzoglou & Alexander Chatzigeorgiou

Authors
  1. George Digkas
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  2. Apostolos Ampatzoglou
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  3. Alexander Chatzigeorgiou
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  4. Paris Avgeriou
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Correspondence to Apostolos Ampatzoglou.

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Work reported in this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 801015 (project EXA2PRO) regarding the contribution of A. Chatzigeorgiou and A. Ampatzoglou, as well as from ITEA3 and RVO under grant agreement No. 17038 (VISDOM), regarding the contribution of P. Avgeriou.

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Digkas, G., Ampatzoglou, A., Chatzigeorgiou, A. et al. The temporality of technical debt introduction on new code and confounding factors. Software Qual J 30, 283–305 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-021-09569-8

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