CODE reuse in practice: Benefiting or harming technical debt
CODE reuse in practice: Benefiting or harming technical debt
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jss.2020.110618
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发表时间：
2020-09-01
影响因子：
3.5
通讯作者：
Chatzigeorgiou, Alexander
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Feitosa, Daniel;Ampatzoglou, Apostolos;Chatzigeorgiou, Alexander
在过去的几年里，TD社区正在努力提供减少TD数量的方法和工具，但也了解基本概念。一个流行的实践，仍然没有被调查的TD的上下文中，是软件重用。本文的目的是研究白盒代码重用和TD本金和利息之间的关系。特别是，我们的目标是揭示代码的重用是否可以导致软件具有更好的TD水平。为了实现这一目标，我们对大约400个OSS系统进行了案例研究，包括89.7万个类，并比较了重用类和本机编写类的TD水平。研究结果表明，重用代码通常具有较低的TD兴趣;然而，它们的本金金额较高。上述结果的综合视图表明，软件工程师应在必要时选择重用代码，因为除了既定的重用好处（即，节约成本、提高生产率等）在维护方面也得到了好处。除了了解现象本身，本研究的结果提供了各种研究和实践的启示。(C)2020爱思唯尔公司All rights reserved.
During the last years the TD community is striving to offer methods and tools for reducing the amount of TD, but also understand the underlying concepts. One popular practice that still has not been investigated in the context of TD, is software reuse. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relation between white-box code reuse and TD principal and interest. In particular, we target at unveiling if the reuse of code can lead to software with better levels of TD. To achieve this goal, we performed a case study on approximately 400 OSS systems, comprised of 897 thousand classes, and compare the levels of TD for reused and natively-written classes. The results of the study suggest that reused code usually has less TD interest; however, the amount of principal in them is higher. A synthesized view of the aforementioned results suggest that software engineers shall opt to reuse code when necessary, since apart from the established reuse benefits (i.e., cost savings, increased productivity, etc.) are also getting benefits in terms of maintenance. Apart from understanding the phenomenon per se, the results of this study provide various implications to research and practice. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.