research-article

An exploratory study on the influence of developers in technical debt

Authors:

Pooyan Behnamghader,

Kamonphop Srisopha,

Barry BoehmAuthors Info & Claims

TechDebt '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt

Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3194164.3194165

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Software systems are often developed by many developers who have a varying range of skills and habits. These developers have a big impact on software quality. Understanding how different developers and developer characteristics impact the quality of a software is crucial to properly deploy human resources and help managers improve quality outcomes which is essential for software systems success. Addressing this concern, we conduct a study on how different developers and developer characteristics such as developer seniority in a system, frequency of commits, and interval between commits relate to Technical Debt (TD). We performed a large-scale analysis on 19,088 commits from 38 Apache Java systems and applied multiple statistical analysis tests to evaluate our hypotheses. Our empirical evaluation suggests that developers unequally increase and decrease TD, a developer seniority in a software system and frequency of commits are negatively correlated with the TD the developer induces, and a developer commit interval has a positive correlation with the TD the developer induces.

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Cited By

Lozada Torres ECadena Martínez RPico Pico M(2024)Technical debt management in academic environments: perspectives and challenges of a software development teamData and Metadata10.56294/dm2024.2333Online publication date: 6-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.56294/dm2024.233
Graf-Vlachy LWagner SCodabux ZGalster MSpinola R(2024)Different Debt: An Addition to the Technical Debt Dataset and a Demonstration Using Developer PersonalityProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3644384.3644475(31-35)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3644384.3644475
Sayago‐Heredia JSailema GPérez‐Castillo RPiattini M(2024)Analyzing the Correlation Between Toxic Comments and Code QualityJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.273937:2Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2739
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

An exploratory study on the influence of developers in technical debt
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Maintaining software

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

TechDebt '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt

May 2018

157 pages

ISBN:9781450357135

DOI:10.1145/3194164

General Chair:
Robert L. Nord
Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh
,
Program Chairs:
Frank Buschmann
Siemens, München, Germany
,
Philippe Kruchten
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Copyright © 2018 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 ACM 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 [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 May 2018

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Funding Sources

the U.S. Department of Defense through the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC)

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ICSE '18

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS

ICSE '18: 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 27 - 28, 2018

Gothenburg, Sweden

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 14 of 31 submissions, 45%

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ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

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Cited By

Lozada Torres ECadena Martínez RPico Pico M(2024)Technical debt management in academic environments: perspectives and challenges of a software development teamData and Metadata10.56294/dm2024.2333Online publication date: 6-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.56294/dm2024.233
Graf-Vlachy LWagner SCodabux ZGalster MSpinola R(2024)Different Debt: An Addition to the Technical Debt Dataset and a Demonstration Using Developer PersonalityProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3644384.3644475(31-35)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3644384.3644475
Sayago‐Heredia JSailema GPérez‐Castillo RPiattini M(2024)Analyzing the Correlation Between Toxic Comments and Code QualityJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.273937:2Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2739
Szabados KFarkas IKovács A(2022)Reproducibility in the technical debt domainActa Universitatis Sapientiae, Informatica10.2478/ausi-2021-001613:2(335-360)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.2478/ausi-2021-0016
Imran AKosar T(2022)Qualitative analysis of the relationship between design smells and software engineering challengesProceedings of the 2022 European Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3571697.3571704(48-55)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571697.3571704
Tan JFeitosa DAvgeriou P(2022)Does it matter who pays back Technical Debt? An empirical study of self-fixed TDInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106738143:COnline publication date: 1-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106738
Imran AKosar T(2021)The Impact of Human Factors on Software SustainabilitySoftware Sustainability10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_12(287-300)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_12
Bedi JKaur K(2020)Understanding factors affecting technical debtInternational Journal of Information Technology10.1007/s41870-020-00487-914:2(1051-1060)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-020-00487-9
Behnamghader PBoehm B(2019)Towards Better Understanding of Software Maintainability EvolutionSystems Engineering in Context10.1007/978-3-030-00114-8_47(593-603)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00114-8_47
Boehm BBehnamghader P(2019)Anticipatory development processes for reducing total ownership costs and schedulesSystems Engineering10.1002/sys.2149022:5(401-410)Online publication date: 7-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21490

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