An agile enthousiast who seeks excellence in software engineering. This is how Patroklos Papapetrou defines himself. Let’s have a techdebt talk with this greek “software gardener” who recently published a very interesting approach on how to identify & remediate resign patterns with code metrics and agile practices, based on the original article written by Michael Duell.

This is the fifth report based on TechDebt.org, a perfect occasion for us to review the past year with metrics, a collection of previous experts interviews and the results of our survey sent to a hundred of IT organizations on how they define and manage Technical Debt of their software development projects.

In this report

• TechDebt metrics evolution overview since May, 2012
• Technical Debt Survey results
• Interview with Ward Cunningham
• Interview with Philippe Kruchten
• Interview with Israel Gat
• Interview with Ipek Ozkaya
• Interview with Jean-Louis Letouzey

» Click here to download the report

Michael MULLER (See other posts)

+10 years experienced Marketing & Communication Manager, specialized in Technology & Innovating companies. Marketing Manager at Tocea. Executive editor at http://dsisionnel.com, a french IT magazine. Creator of http://d8p.it, a cool url shortener. Dad of 2 kids.

If you are a regular reader of our Technical Debt Reports, you have probably noticed that the technical debt recently decreased from 374K days to 38K days. Don’t worry, we’re not wizards and remediation costs do not magically disappea. However, a quick explanation is necessary.

In conjunction with ICSE 2013, San Francisco, CA, the call for papers for the 4th International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt is now open. Delivering complex, large-scale systems faces the ongoing challenge of how best to balance rapid deployment with long-term value. From the original description—”not quite right code which we postpone making it right”—various people have used the metaphor of technical debt to describe many other kinds of debts or ills of software development, encompassing broadly anything that stands in the way of deploying, selling, or evolving a software system or anything that adds to the friction from which software development endeavors suffer: test debt, people debt, architectural debt, requirement debt, documentation debt, or just an amorphous, all-encompassing software debt.

At least, the latest version of TechDebt’s dashboard is online. Six month after the launch, TechDebt 1.1 comes with a brand new interface, deep focus on technical debt and software quality measures, technology benchmark and metrics history. Let’s see what’s new…

The TechDebt Report #3 (October, 2012) is available! This is the third report based on TechDebt.org‘s data. It presents the main evolutions of the audit database and the various metrics of the dashboard. It will also give you some tips to configure your rules repository and especially five important rules that seem unknown. This report details the software quality metrics collected since July, 2012.

This report details the software quality metrics collected since July, 2012.

Technologies analyzed:

• Java,
• Javascript,
• C++,
• Web (HTML/CSS),
• C#,
• PHP,
• XML,
• Abap (SAP),
• Visual Basic,
• Natural

Metrics and rule controls are performed with the following tools (among others):

• PCLint,
• PHP CodeSniffer,
• FindBugs,
• Scertify,
• Fortify,
• PMD,
• FXCop,
• RATS,
• CPPCheck,
• Gendarme,
• Checkstyle,
• StyleCop,
• Pylint,
• Toad,
• Vera++,
• Valgrind,
• NATstyle,
• Clirr,
• etc.

Thanks to Armel Gouriou for this paper.

1,293 software projects tracked, 78M+ lines of code analyzed, 59K days of technical debt detected: The first TechDebt Report (June, 2012) is available for download on Tocea’s website. Thanks to Armel Gouriou for this paper.

When thinking about technical debt of applications, many questions come in our minds: Should we take architecture’s defects into account to quantify the debt, as we already do with code defects? Can Agile developments generate an unintended debt? Ipek OZKAYA, a senior member of the technical staff at SEI, kindly answered to our questions.

Let’s continue our serie of interviews with people who had and continue having major influence on the definition of technical debt and its implementation in software development projects. Philippe KRUCHTEN, software engineering professor at UBC, who directed the development of the RUP (Rational Unified Process), explains his vision of technical debt and how to manage it, in order to take right decisions at the right time.

Sigma, a French IT company specialized in software development, consulting, integration and outsourcing- contributes to TechDebt.org.