软件集成开发环境的技术债务管理研究

软件技术债务是运用经济学中“债务”的概念来描述软件开发中因项目短期利益而实施的技术折中。但从长期来看,技术债务会影响软件的质量、成本和开发效率,因此有必要对其进行有效管理。现有的技术债务管理工具数量少且存在各种局限性,难以实现有效的管理。主流的软件集成开发环境功能强大且应用广泛,可以为技术债务管理服务。以具有代表性的集成开发环境Visual Studio 2015企业版为研究对象,通过C#实例发现其管理4类与代码直接相关的技术债务的能力,并将其与4种专门的技术债务管理工具进行对比,为开发团队的日常实践提供技术债务管理支持。结果表明,Visual Studio能够提供更好的技术债务管理功能,并能应用多种方法对项目中存在的各类技术债务进行不同程度的管理。

Study on Technical Debt Management of Integrated Development Environment

Technical debt (TD),a metaphor to financial debt,refers to technical compromises which are made to gain short-term benefits at the cost of long-term software quality.However,in the long run TD will negatively affect software quality as well as cost and productivity of software development.Thus,TD should be effectively managed.Existing dedicated TD management tools are rather limited and have various limitations.Hence,it is difficult to effectively mana-ge TD using such tools.Mainstream integrated development environments (IDEs) are powerful and widely used,can serve to manage TD.In this study,we investigated Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition,a representative mainstream IDE,to explore its ability for managing four types of TD directly related to source code using a C# project.Then we compared Visual Studio with four dedicated TD management tools with respect to their capabilities in mana-ging TD and their support for TD management of development teams in their daily practices.The results show that VisualStudio provides better support for managing TD in terms of diversity of TD types and the range of TD management activities.In addition,with Visual Studio,specific TD instances can be managed to different extents in a variety of ways.