ATDx: A tool for providing a data-driven overview of architectural technical debt in software-intensive systems

Sebastian Ospina*, Roberto Verdecchia, Ivano Malavolta, Patricia Lago

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Architectural technical debt (ATD) in software-intensive systems is mostly invisible to software developers, can be widespread throughout entire code-bases, and its remediation cost is often steep. In recent years, numerous approaches have been proposed to identify, keep track, and ultimately manage ATD. The variety of approaches available opens a new problem, namely how to gain an encompassing overview of the ATD identified in a software-intensive system. With this paper we make available the ATDx tool, an implementation of ATDx written in Python, designed in a plug-in fashion. ATDx is an approach designed to provide a data-driven, intuitive, and actionable overview of the ATD present in a portfolio of software projects. ATDx is based on third-party source code analysis tools, architectural issue severity calculation via clustering, and aggregation of measurements into different architectural technical debt dimensions. The ATDx tool allows users to automatically run the ATDx analysis, generate reports containing the ATDx analysis results, and is integrated with GitHub. In addition to the tool, we provide two already implemented plugins, allowing users to run the ATDx tool out-of-the-box. GitHub repository: https://github.com/S2-group/ATDx Video: https://youtu.be/ULT9fgxuB7E

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationECSA-C 2021 Companion Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Software Architecture
Subtitle of host publicationECSA 2021 Companion Volume Virtual (originally: Växjö, Sweden), 13-17 September, 2021
EditorsRobert Heinrich, Raffaela Mirandola, Danny Weyns
PublisherCEUR-WS
Number of pages5
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event15th European Conference on Software Architecture - Companion, ECSA-C 2021 - Virtual, Online, Sweden
Duration: 13 Sept 202117 Sept 2021

Publication series

NameCEUR Workshop Proceedings
PublisherCEUR Workshop Proceedings
Volume2978
ISSN (Print)1613-0073

Conference

Conference15th European Conference on Software Architecture - Companion, ECSA-C 2021
Country/TerritorySweden
CityVirtual, Online
Period13/09/2117/09/21

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Keywords

  • Index
  • Software Architecture
  • Software Engineering
  • Technical Debt
  • Tool

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