Print Email Facebook Twitter The Delta Maintainability Model: Measuring Maintainability of Fine-Grained Code Changes Title The Delta Maintainability Model: Measuring Maintainability of Fine-Grained Code Changes Author di Biase, M. (TU Delft Software Engineering) Rastogi, A. (TU Delft Software Engineering) Bruntink, Magiel (Software Improvement Group) van Deursen, A. (TU Delft Software Technology) Department Software Technology Date 2019 Abstract Existing maintainability models are used to identify technical debt of software systems. Targeting entire codebases, such models lack the ability to determine shortcomings of smaller, fine-grained changes. This paper proposes a new maintainability model – the Delta Maintainability Model (DMM) – to measure fine-grained code changes, such as commits, by adapting and extending the SIG Maintainability Model. DMM categorizes changed lines of code into low and high risk, and then uses the proportion of low risk change to calculate a delta score. The goal of the DMM is twofold: first, producing meaningful and actionable scores; second, compare and rank the maintainability of fine-grained modifications.We report on an initial study of the model, with the goal of understanding if the adapted measurements from the SIG Maintainability Model suit the fine-grained scope of the DMM. In a manual inspection process for 100 commits, 67 cases matched the expert judgment. Furthermore, we report an exploratory empirical study on a data set of DMM scores on 3,017 issue-fixing commits of four open source and four closed source systems. Results show that the scores of DMM can be used to compare and rank commits, providing developers with a means to do root cause analysis on activities that impacted maintainability and, thus, address technical debt at a finer granularity. Subject CommitsFine grainedMaintainabilityModelTechnical debt To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6ff67dee-2781-47d7-916f-bd36c5b61beb DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2606632 Publisher IEEE ISBN 9781728133713 Source Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Technical Debt, TechDebt 2019 Event TechDebt 2019 - International Conference on Technical Debt, 2019-05-26 → 2019-05-27, MontréaL, Canada Series Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Technical Debt, TechDebt 2019 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights © 2019 M. di Biase, A. Rastogi, Magiel Bruntink, A. van Deursen Files PDF deltamaintainability.pdf 631.3 KB PDF deltamaintainability_techreport.pdf 306.07 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:6ff67dee-2781-47d7-916f-bd36c5b61beb/datastream/OBJ1/view