DebtFlag: Technical debt management with a development environment integrated tool

Author

Holvitie, Johannes ; Leppanen, Ville

Author_Institution

Dept. of Inf. Technol., Univ. of Turku, Turku, Finland

fYear

2013

fDate

20-20 May 2013

Firstpage

20

Lastpage

27

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the DebtFlag tool for capturing, tracking and resolving technical debt in software projects. DebtFlag integrates into the development environment and provides developers with lightweight documentation tools to capture technical debt and link them to corresponding parts in the implementation. During continued development these links are used to create propagation paths for the documented debt. This allows for an up-to-date and accurate presentation of technical debt to be upheld, which enables developer conducted implementation-level micromanagement as well as higher level technical debt management.

Keywords

project management; software maintenance; software management; system documentation; DebtFlag tool; continued development; development environment integrated tool; documented debt; implementation-level micromanagement; lightweight documentation tools; propagation paths; software development environment; software projects; technical debt capturing; technical debt management; technical debt resolving; technical debt tracking; Cognition; Color; Context; Documentation; Java; Software; Visualization; DebtFlag; Technical debt; source code analysis; source code assessment; technical debt management;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Managing Technical Debt (MTD), 2013 4th International Workshop on

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MTD.2013.6608674

Filename

6608674