Evolution of technical debt remediation in Python: A case study on the Apache Software Ecosystem,Journal of Software: Evolution and Process

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Evolution of technical debt remediation in Python: A case study on the Apache Software Ecosystem
Journal of Software: Evolution and Process ( IF 1.7 ) Pub Date : 2020-11-18 , DOI: 10.1002/smr.2319
Jie Tan ₁ , Daniel Feitosa _{1,

2} , Paris Avgeriou ₁ , Mircea Lungu ₃

Affiliation

In recent years, the evolution of software ecosystems and the detection of technical debt received significant attention by researchers from both industry and academia. While a few studies that analyze various aspects of technical debt evolution already exist, to the best of our knowledge, there is no large-scale study that focuses on the remediation of technical debt over time in Python projects -- i.e., one of the most popular programming languages at the moment. In this paper, we analyze the evolution of technical debt in 44 Python open-source software projects belonging to the Apache Software Foundation. We focus on the type and amount of technical debt that is paid back. The study required the mining of over 60K commits, detailed code analysis on 3.7K system versions, and the analysis of almost 43K fixed issues. The findings show that most of the repayment effort goes into testing, documentation, complexity and duplication removal. Moreover, more than half of the Python technical debt in the ecosystem is short-term being repaid in less than two months. In particular, the observations that a minority of rules account for the majority of issues fixed and spent effort, suggest that addressing those kinds of debt in the future is important for research and practice.

中文翻译：

Python 技术债务修复的演变：Apache 软件生态系统的案例研究

近年来，软件生态系统的演变和技术债务的检测受到了工业界和学术界研究人员的极大关注。虽然已经存在一些分析技术债务演变各个方面的研究，但据我们所知，还没有大规模的研究专注于 Python 项目中技术债务随时间的修复——即最重要的研究之一。目前流行的编程语言。在本文中，我们分析了属于 Apache 软件基金会的 44 个 Python 开源软件项目中技术债务的演变。我们专注于偿还的技术债务的类型和数量。该研究需要挖掘超过 60K 的提交，对 3.7K 系统版本进行详细的代码分析，以及对近 43K 修复问题的分析。调查结果表明，大部分还款工作都用于测试、文档、复杂性和重复删除。此外，生态系统中超过一半的 Python 技术债务是在不到两个月的时间内短期偿还的。特别是，少数规则占大多数已解决问题和花费精力的观察表明，未来解决这些类型的债务对于研究和实践很重要。

更新日期：2020-11-18

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