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International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement

PROFES 2022: Product-Focused Software Process Improvement pp 265–281Cite as

Technical Debt in Service-Oriented Software Systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13709))

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) have become a standard for developing software applications, including but not limited to cloud-based ones and enterprise systems. When using SOA, the software engineers organize the desired functionality into self-contained and independent services, that are invoked through end-points (API calls). At the maintenance phase, the tickets (bugs, functional updates, new features, etc.) usually correspond to specific services. Therefore, for maintenance-related estimates it makes sense to use as unit of analysis the service-per se, rather than the complete project (too coarse-grained analysis) or a specific class (too fine-grained analysis). Currently, some of the most emergent maintenance estimates are related to Technical Debt (TD), i.e., the additional maintenance cost incurred due to code or design inefficiencies. In the literature, there is no established way on how to quantify TD at the service level. To this end, in this paper, we present a novel methodology to measure the TD of each service considering the underlying code that sup-ports the corresponding endpoint. The proposed methodology relies on the method call graph, initiated by the service end-point, and traverses all methods that provide the service functionality. To evaluate the usefulness of this approach, we have conducted an industrial study, validating the methodology (and the accompanying tool) with respect to usefulness, obtained benefits, and usability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/shopizer-ecommerce/shopizer.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/eclipse-researchlabs/smartclide-td-reusability-theia.

  3. 3.

    http://195.251.210.147:3131.

  4. 4.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/vagrr2wdc9p6nu9/SupplementaryMaterial.pdf?dl=0.

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Acknowledgment

Work reported in this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871177 (project: SmartCLIDE).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Apostolos Ampatzoglou & Alexander Chatzigeorgiou

  2. NetCompany-Intrasoft, Athens, Greece

    Sofia Tsekeridou & Avraam Piperidis

Authors
  1. Nikolaos Nikolaidis
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  2. Apostolos Ampatzoglou
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  3. Alexander Chatzigeorgiou
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  4. Sofia Tsekeridou
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  5. Avraam Piperidis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nikolaos Nikolaidis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Davide Taibi

  2. Reutlingen University, Reutlingen, Germany

    Marco Kuhrmann

  3. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Tommi Mikkonen

  4. Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Jil Klünder

  5. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Pekka Abrahamsson

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Cite this paper

Nikolaidis, N., Ampatzoglou, A., Chatzigeorgiou, A., Tsekeridou, S., Piperidis, A. (2022). Technical Debt in Service-Oriented Software Systems. In: Taibi, D., Kuhrmann, M., Mikkonen, T., Klünder, J., Abrahamsson, P. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13709. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21388-5_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21388-5_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-21387-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-21388-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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