Comparing Maintainability Index, SIG Method, and SQALE for Technical Debt Identification

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Authors

STREČANSKÝ Peter CHREN Stanislav ROSSI Bruno

Year of publication 2020
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference 35th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3341105.3374079
Keywords Software Technical Debt; Software Maintenance; Software Quality; Maintainability Index; SIG Method; SQALE
Description Many techniques have emerged to evaluate software Technical Debt (TD). However, differences in reporting TD are not yet studied widely, as they can give different perceptions about the evolution of TD in projects. The goal of this paper is to compare three TD identification techniques: i. Maintainability Index (MI), ii. SIG TD models and iii. SQALE analysis. Considering 17 large open source Python libraries, we compare TD measurements time series in terms of trends in different sets of releases (major, minor, micro). While all methods report generally growing trends of TD over time, MI, SIG TD, and SQALE all report different patterns of TD evolution.
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