Browsing by Author "Griffith, Isaac Daniel"

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Design pattern decay: a study of design pattern grime and its impact on quality and technical debt
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2021) Griffith, Isaac Daniel; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Clemente Izurieta
Technical debt is a financial metaphor describing the trade-off between the short-term benefits gained and long-term consequences of design and implementation shortcuts taken over the evolution of a software product. These shortcuts typically manifest as design disharmonies such as code smells, anti-patterns, or design pattern grime. Design pattern grime, which manifests as the accumulation of unnecessary or unrelated software artifacts within design pattern instance classes is of serious concern. Design patterns represent agreed upon methods to solve common problems and are based upon sound principles of good design; thus, these pattern instances' decay implies an evolution away from good design. Currently, little is known about the causal nature of design pattern grime on technical debt and quality or how these three issues interrelate. What is the nature of the relationships between structural design pattern grime, software maintainability, and technical debt measurement? To better understand design pattern grime, we have extended the structural grime taxonomy. We developed an approach to generate design pattern grime instances and inject them with design pattern grime. Using this approach, we conducted 7 experiments evaluating the effects of 26 forms of grime, at 6 severity levels within 16 design pattern types, on software maintainability and technical debt. The results showed that depending upon grime type, grime severity, and pattern type, grime does significantly affect both maintainability and technical debt. We also conducted a verification study on pairs of pattern instances from open-source software systems to evaluate how well the injection process represents the real effects of grime and to verify the results of the experiments. The results of this study showed that there is a disconnect between the injection process and reality, indicating that refinements are still needed. However, the verification study worked as expected in indicating where issues may exist in the process.
Technical debt management in release planning : a decision support framework
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2014) Griffith, Isaac Daniel; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Clemente Izurieta; Hanane Taffahi, David Claudio and Clemente Izurieta were co-authors of the article, 'Initial simulation study' in the journal 'Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference' which is contained within this thesis.
Technical debt is a financial metaphor used to describe the tradeoff between the short term benefit of taking a shortcut during the design or implementation phase of a software product (e.g., in order to meet a deadline) and the long term consequences of taking said shortcut, which may affect the quality of the software product. Recently, academics and industry practitioners have offered several models and methods which purport to explain or manage this phenomenon. Unfortunately, to date, there has yet to be a framework which supports managers in making decisions regarding technical debt. Although similar solutions exist to support the release planning phase of software development, they focus on the management of new features and do not take into account issues relating to technical debt and its effects on the development process. This thesis describes a software engineering decision support system focusing on three key components: analysis and decision, intelligence, and simulation. Supporting each of these components is a meta-model which bridges the gap between technical debt management and software release planning. To investigate the development of the analysis and decision and intelligence components we used a reduced form of this meta-model in conjunction with a coalition formation games approach. This approach served to evaluate the technical debt management and release planning issues, and was found superior, using simulation, in comparison to a first-come, first-served method (representative of typical agile planning processes). To investigate the development of the simulation component we conducted a simulation study to evaluate different strategies for technical debt management as proposed in the literature. The results of this study provide compelling evidence for current technical debt management strategies proposed in the literature that can be immediately applied by practitioners. Finally, we describe the initial work on an extended simulation framework which will form the basis of a complete simulation component for a technical debt management and release planning decision support framework.