Increasing, Not Diminishing: Investigating Returns of Highly Maintainable Code

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13407

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

26 8 2 years ago

arxiv.org

mianos• 2 years ago

Has 'Technical Debt' become a formal term now?

free_bip• 2 years ago

It's been a formal term for quite a while now, has it not?

adamsilkey• 2 years ago

Most everyone agrees that technical debt is a real thing, but I don’t think we’ve landed on a widely accepted formal definition of what it is. Tech debt is so often used as a qualitative health term with no quantitative metrics behind it.

This paper establishes what it defines as tech debt, but it’s certainly not universal.

pylua• 2 years ago

Code quality is very subjective. Assuming you eliminate the extreme cases of poor code and great code, most people being average, the best thing to do is keep a talented team together as long as possible. The team will accrue knowledge slowly at first but will produce dividends later on as they will have the best knowledge of the system.

Excluding extremely poor situations it is domain knowledge that drives defects, not the code.

taxikabs• 2 years ago

That sounds ideal, but hard to control ultimately. Pay and opportunities for growth are typically going to be constrained at most places long term.

It seems like it's worth identifying weak spots in your codebases where higher complexity is lying, you have sole contributors on your team, or buggy areas. Armed with the information, you can plan ahead for them. Would refactoring into a different design better manage the complexity? Can we get more team members involved in changes to parts of a system we don't have familiarity with, for redundancy? Why are we fielding so many bugs in this functionality and how do we mitigate it?

sakjur• 2 years ago

Code Health (CH) is quantified through the CodeScene tool, yielding a numeric and absolute value that ranges between 10 (top-notch code quality) and 1 (extremely poor code quality).

Three of the four researchers are associated with the company behind CodeScene and the datasets are provided by CodeScene’s customers. They’re somewhat acknowledging this bias, but it might be good to know about before you take this for a fact and cite it based on the title alone.

Increasing, Not Diminishing: Investigating Returns of Highly Maintainable Code

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