Francesca Arcelli Fontana

Darius Sas, Ilaria Pigazzini, Paris Avgeriou et al.

Architectural Technical Debt (ATD) is considered as the most significant type of TD in industrial practice. In this study, we interview 21 software engineers and architects to investigate a specific type of ATD, namely architectural smells (AS). Our goal is to understand the phenomenon of AS better and support practitioners to better manage it and researchers to offer relevant support. The findings of this study provide insights on how practitioners perceive AS and how they introduce them, the maintenance and evolution issues they experienced and associated to the presence of AS, and what practices and tools they adopt to manage AS.

Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba, Francesca Arcelli Fontana et al.

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to comprehend source code, researchers empirically showed that the presence of code smells heavily impacts the change-proneness of the affected classes. On the basis of these findings, in this paper we conjecture that code smell-related information can be effectively exploited to improve the performance of change prediction models, ie models having as goal that of indicating to developers which classes are more likely to change in the future, so that they may apply preventive maintenance actions. Specifically, we exploit the so-called intensity index - a previously defined metric that captures the severity of a code smell - and evaluate its contribution when added as additional feature in the context of three state of the art change prediction models based on product, process, and developer-based features. We also compare the performance achieved by the proposed model with the one of an alternative technique that considers the previously defined antipattern metrics, namely a set of indicators computed considering the history of code smells in files. Our results report that (i) the prediction performance of the intensity-including models is statistically better than that of the baselines and (ii) the intensity is a more powerful metric with respect to the alternative smell-related ones.

Valentina Lenarduzzi, Terese Besker, Davide Taibi et al.

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations.