Technical Debt Management ToolBox

In the last years, the technical debt research community has been spending increasingly large effort on the different activities of Technical Debt Management (TDM). To a large extent, this research is focusing on issues related to cost and benefit analysis of software quality management.

Technical Debt Management ToolBox is a ToolBox developed in the context of a European Union project H2020 (SDK4ED - https://sdk4ed.eu). It provides version history analysis in all aspects of technical debt (TD principal, TD interest, TD breaking point, TD interest probability).

Technical Debt is a software engineering metaphor, referring to the eventual financial consequences of trade-offs between shrinking product time to market and poorly specifying, or implementing a software product, throughout all development phases. It can be an appropriate business decision to take on technical debt, but if such debt is allowed to grow, the lack of quality of the system may eventually make it too expensive to maintain, at which point the business or team may need to declare “technical bankruptcy” and rewrite the application rather than continue to try to maintain it.

More on:

• A. A. Tsintzira, A. Ampatzoglou, O. Matei, A. Ampatzoglou, A. Chatzigeorgiou, and R. Heb, “Technical Debt Quantification through Metrics: An Industrial Validation”, 15th China-Europe International Symposium on Software Engineering Education (CEISEE’ 19), IEEE, Lisbon, Portugal, May 30-31, 2019

• Areti Ampatzoglou, Alexander Michailidis, Christos Sarikyriakidis, Apostolos Ampatzoglou, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou, and Paris Avgeriou,“A Framework for Managing Interest in Technical Debt: An Industrial Validation”, 1st International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt 2018), Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27-28, 2018

• A. Chatzigeorgiou, A. Ampatzoglou, A. Ampatzoglou, and Theodoros Amanatidis, "Estimating the Breaking Point for Technical Debt", 7th International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt (MTD'2015), Bremen, Germany, October 2, 2015

Prerequisites

• SonarQube (7.9 version): SonarQube is an automatic code review tool to detect bugs, vulnerabilities and code smells in your code. It can integrate with your existing workflow to enable continuous code inspection across your project branches and pull requests. Learn more here - https://docs.sonarqube.org/7.9/. There is a detailed explanation of how SQ works, what are the prerequisites and how to do the installation.
• PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. PostgreSQL is being used from SonarQube to save the analysis results.
• SonarScanner: The SonarQube Scanner is recommended as the default launcher to analyze a project with SonarQube. Find more on SonarQube's website.
• MySQL: MySQL is a freely available open source Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL). MySQL is being used from the Technical Debt Management ToolBox to save the analysis results.
• Java 8: Technical-Debt-Management-ToolBox is written and compiled in Java 8

Optional

To have a more distrubuted system and to management all the services in a more efficiency way, you can use docker containers, one for each service.

Installation

Step 1: Build the project

After all the above services have been installed, have been configured properly and have been tested, open a Java IDE.

Use Maven to build the project.

mvn clean package

or

Use IDE extract jar options.

Go to Project -> Click -> Export -> Runnable JAR File. Then, select <Export generated class files and sources> and make sure that your project is selected.

Step 2: Create Database

Open MySQL Database and create a new database. Keep in a safe place your username, password and database name. As a database name I used 'analyjed_jar' but you are completly free to choose the name you prefer.

Step 3: Create & Configure configurations.txt file

# Configurations about Database
username=user
password=pass
serverName=localhost:5555
databaseName=analyjed_jar

# Configurations about sonarQube
sonarqube_execution:sonar-scanner
project_path:/Users/Projects/Project1
sonar_url:http://localhost:9906

The first 4 paremeters are the username and password to connect on MySQL, the server name with the port and the database name. Then, you have to specify the exact location of SonarScanner binary, the folder in which you have saved the source code. Tha last folder is the same folder in which the extracted jar is located.

Step 4: Put them all together

Create a folder in which you move the extracted jar, the configuration.txt file and the jars file from the externalTools folder.

mkdir TechnicalDebtManagementToolBox
mv path/technicalDebtManagmentToolbox.jar TechnicalDebtManagementToolBox
mv path/externalTools/metrics_calculator.jar TechnicalDebtManagementToolBox
mv path/externalTools/interest_probabilityNoGUI.jar TechnicalDebtManagementToolBox
mv path/externalTools/metrics_calculator_noOop.jar TechnicalDebtManagementToolBox

Execution

• You need to have a git repositiry with the source code. The repository can be public or private.

Usage

Open the folder TechnicalDebtManagementToolBox and execute the tool.

cd TechnicalDebtManagementToolBox
java -jar technicalDebtManagmentToolbox.jar projectName language versions gitUrl gitUsername gitPassword shas

where:

• language: Programming language. Possible values {"Java", "C"}
• typeAnalysis: 1 for full analysis, 2 to add a new version
• gitUrl: Url from git in order to clone the source code and do the analysis
• gitUsername: Username of the git account
• gitPassword: Password of the gi account. If it is public, just type 1 character for example 1
• moveClassRefactoring: true to do the refactoring analysis, false to not do the refactoring analysis,
• extractMethodRefactoring: true to do the refactoring analysis, false to not do the refactoring analysis,