How do developers fix issues and pay back technical debt in the Apache ecosystem?

2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) Pub Date : 2018-03-20 DOI:10.1109/SANER.2018.8330205

Georgios Digkas, M. Lungu, P. Avgeriou, A. Chatzigeorgiou, Apostolos Ampatzoglou

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引用次数: 58

Abstract

During software evolution technical debt (TD) follows a constant ebb and flow, being incurred and paid back, sometimes in the same day and sometimes ten years later. There have been several studies in the literature investigating how technical debt in source code accumulates during time and the consequences of this accumulation for software maintenance. However, to the best of our knowledge there are no large scale studies that focus on the types of issues that are fixed and the amount of TD that is paid back during software evolution. In this paper we present the results of a case study, in which we analyzed the evolution of fifty-seven Java open-source software projects by the Apache Software Foundation at the temporal granularity level of weekly snapshots. In particular, we focus on the amount of technical debt that is paid back and the types of issues that are fixed. The findings reveal that a small subset of all issue types is responsible for the largest percentage of TD repayment and thus, targeting particular violations the development team can achieve higher benefits.

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开发人员如何修复问题并偿还Apache生态系统中的技术债务?

在软件发展过程中，技术债务(TD)遵循一个恒定的起起落落，产生和偿还，有时在同一天，有时在十年后。文献中已经有一些研究调查了源代码中的技术债务是如何随着时间的推移而积累的，以及这种积累对软件维护的影响。然而，据我们所知，目前还没有大规模的研究集中在固定的问题类型和软件开发过程中偿还的TD数量上。在本文中，我们展示了一个案例研究的结果，在这个案例中，我们分析了Apache软件基金会在每周快照的时间粒度级别上的57个Java开源软件项目的演变。特别地，我们关注已偿还的技术债务的数量和已修复的问题类型。研究结果表明，所有问题类型中的一小部分负责最大比例的TD偿还，因此，针对特定的违规行为，开发团队可以获得更高的收益。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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