research-article
Authors: Markus Borg, Ilyana Pruvost, Enys Mones, and Adam Tornhill
TechDebt '24: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt
April 2024
Pages 21 - 30
Published: 07 June 2024 Publication History
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Abstract
Understanding and effectively managing Technical Debt (TD) remains a vital challenge in software engineering. While many studies on code-level TD have been published, few illustrate the business impact of low-quality source code. In this study, we combine two publicly available datasets to study the association between code quality on the one hand, and defect count and implementation time on the other hand. We introduce a value-creation model, derived from regression analyses, to explore relative changes from a baseline. Our results show that the associations vary across different intervals of code quality. Furthermore, the value model suggests strong non-linearities at the extremes of the code quality spectrum. Most importantly, the model suggests amplified returns on investment in the upper end. We discuss the findings within the context of the "broken windows" theory and recommend organizations to diligently prevent the introduction of code smells in files with high churn. Finally, we argue that the value-creation model can be used to initiate discussions regarding the return on investment in refactoring efforts.
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Information & Contributors
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Published In
TechDebt '24: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt
April 2024
55 pages
ISBN:9798400705908
DOI:10.1145/3644384
- Chair:
- Matthias Galster
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
, - Program Chair:
- Zadia Codabux
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
, - Program Co-chair:
- Rodrigo Spinola
Virginia Commonwealth University, USA
Copyright © 2024 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [emailprotected].
Sponsors
- SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
- IEEE CS
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 07 June 2024
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Author Tags
- mining software repositories
- source code quality
- maintainability
- technical debt
- business impact
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
TechDebt '24
Sponsor:
- SIGSOFT
TechDebt '24: 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt
April 14 - 15, 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
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Overall Acceptance Rate 14 of 31 submissions, 45%
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