Towards Surgically-Precise Technical Debt Estimation: Early Results and Research Roadmap
This work addresses the challenge of better estimating technical debt for software developers and project managers, but it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackled the problem of imprecise technical debt estimation by applying simple regression modeling to improve existing industry tools like SonarQube, showing promising results for more accurate cost predictions.
The concept of technical debt has been explored from many perspectives but its precise estimation is still under heavy empirical and experimental inquiry. We aim to understand whether, by harnessing approximate, data-driven, machine-learning approaches it is possible to improve the current techniques for technical debt estimation, as represented by a top industry quality analysis tool such as SonarQube. For the sake of simplicity, we focus on relatively simple regression modelling techniques and apply them to modelling the additional project cost connected to the sub-optimal conditions existing in the projects under study. Our results shows that current techniques can be improved towards a more precise estimation of technical debt and the case study shows promising results towards the identification of more accurate estimation of technical debt.