Exploring software supply chains from a technical debt perspective

Software development has evolved from software development organizations building custom solutions for every need and creating a backlog of applications needed by users to specialized organizations producing components that are supplied to other software development organizations to speed the development of their software products. Our objective is to illustrate how a manager might use supply chain information to evaluate software being considered for inclusion in a product. We investigated the Eclipse platform code to illustrate analysis methods that produce information of use to decision makers. The technical debt of the software pieces was measured using the Technical Debt plug-in to Sonar as one input into the evaluation of supply chain quality. The dependency graphs of “uses” relationships among files were analyzed using graph metrics such as betweenness centrality. There was a statistically significant moderate correlation between the technical debt for a file and the betweenness centrality for that file. This relationship is used as the basis for a heuristic approach to forming advice to a development manager regarding which assets to acquire.