TechDebt 2023
Sun 14 - Mon 15 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia
co-located with ICSE 2023

During the evolution of a software system, it is inevitable that changes accumulatively lead to architecture erosion and architectural debt. A plethora of metric-based methods have been developed to identify architectural problems, which violate the design principle and degrades the software maintainability. However, as argued by practitioners, those metrics with the architectural problems detected by them are lack of the comprehensibility, interpretability, and indicative(lity) when applied to the industry. To address this issue, we propose dbMIT to identify potential code changes that make architecture decay. Our dbMIT first integrates popular implementation-level metrics such as the CK suite through syntactic dependencies and evolutionary dependencies. Then dbMIT constructs a forest structure as a knowledge base to relate the metrics together, where the relations go through the multiple-granularity metrics. Via pre-defined rules using the knowledge base, our dbMIT identifies code changes potentially causing the architecture decay. Due to usage of the forest structure of code-level metrics, it is easy for developers to understand the measurements, to explain why the detected code changes are potential contributors for the decay, and to indicate how to resolve them. Based on dbMIT, we also contribute a web-based tool to measure, detect and visualize the software architecture with potential causes of the maintainability difficulty. Our experiments on the collected open-source projects demonstrate the effectiveness of dbMIT in comparison with existing methods.

Sun 14 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

15:45 - 17:15
Architecture and Documentation Technical DebtTechnical Papers / Plenary at Meeting Room 101
15:45
25m
Research paper
Identifying Code Changes for Architecture Decay via a Metric Forest Structure
Technical Papers
Wuxia Jin Xi'an Jiaotong University, Yuyun Zhang Xi'an Jiaotong University, Jiaowei Shang Xi'an Jiaotong University, Yi Hou Xi'an Jiaotong University, Ming Fan Xi'an Jiaotong University, Ting Liu Xi'an Jiaotong University
16:10
25m
Research paper
Resolving Security Issues via Quality-Oriented Refactoring: A User Study
Technical Papers
Domenico Gigante SER&Practices and University of Bari, Fabiano Pecorelli Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, Vita Santa Barletta University of Bari, Andrea Janes FHV Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences, Valentina Lenarduzzi University of Oulu, Davide Taibi Tampere University , Maria Teresa Baldassarre Department of Computer Science, University of Bari
16:35
25m
Research paper
Towards identifying and minimizing customer-facing documentation debt
Technical Papers
Lakmal Silva Blekinge Institute of Technology, Michael Unterkalmsteiner Blekinge Institute of Technology, Krzysztof Wnuk
17:00
15m
Live Q&A
Open Q&A
Plenary