Technical debt (TD) contextualizes problems faced during software evolution considering the tasks that are not carried out adequately during software development. Software TD is a type of debt that brings a short-term benefit, but which may have to be paid with interest later on in the software development life cycle. Its presence brings risks to the project and can reduce its quality. It is worthwhile to have automatic mechanisms to monitor it, as TD monitoring requires the analysis of large amounts of complex data. Therefore, the combination of software metrics and code comment analysis, in the identification, and information visualization techniques, in monitoring, present themselves as a promising strategy to manage TD. This work presents VisminerTD, a tool that allows the automatic identification and interactive monitoring of the evolution of TD items by combining software metrics, code comment analysis, and information visualization. To evaluate its applicability, a feasibility study was carried out considering JUnit 4 and Apache Ant software projects. The results indicated that VisminerTD can support software development teams in monitoring TD items. In addition, a second case study was performed to assess the feasibility of the proposed tool regarding its usefulness, ease of use, and self-predicted future use. The results provided positive evidence on the use of the proposed tool, indicating (i) that it can be useful in supporting TD Identification and TD monitoring activities and (ii) that it can bring gains in terms of comprehensiveness and efficacy when evaluating the desirable time to identify and monitor different types of debt. Given the current scenario characterized by limited options of tools that combine different information to support automatic identification and monitoring of the evolution of TD items in software projects, VisminerTD can approximate the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice in the TD area, contributing to a wider dissemination of the concept.

中文翻译：

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VisminerTD：自​​动识别和交互式监控技术债项演变的工具

考虑到在软件开发过程中没有充分执行的任务，技术债务 (TD) 将软件演化过程中面临的问题背景化。软件 TD 是一种能带来短期利益的债务，但可能必须在软件开发生命周期的后期支付利息。它的存在会给项目带来风险并降低其质量。有自动机制来监控它是值得的，因为 TD 监控需要分析大量复杂的数据。因此，软件度量和代码注释分析的结合，在识别和信息可视化技术，在监控中，是管理 TD 的一种有前途的策略。这项工作提出了 VisminerTD，通过结合软件度量、代码注释分析和信息可视化，允许自动识别和交互式监控 TD 项的演变的工具。为了评估其适用性，考虑到 JUnit 4 和 Apache Ant 软件项目进行了可行性研究。结果表明，VisminerTD 可以支持软件开发团队监控 TD 项目。此外，还进行了第二个案例研究，以评估拟议工具在其实用性、易用性和自我预测未来使用方面的可行性。结果为使用建议的工具提供了积极的证据，表明 (i) 它可用于支持 TD 识别和 TD 监控活动，以及 (ii) 在评估识别和监控不同类型债务的理想时间时，它可以在全面性和有效性方面带来收益。鉴于当前场景的特点是，结合不同信息以支持自动识别和监控软件项目中 TD 项的演变的工具选项有限，VisminerTD 可以接近最新技术和最新实践在 TD 领域，有助于更广泛地传播这一概念。