RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 The role of awareness and gamification on technical debt management
A1 Crespo, Yania
A1 López Nozal, Carlos
A1 Marticorena Sánchez, Raúl
A1 Gonzalo Tasis, Margarita
A1 Piattini, Mario
K1 Technical Debt
K1 Raising awareness
K1 SonarQube
K1 Gamification
K1 Quasi-experiment
K1 Desarrollo de aplicaciones-Informática
K1 Computer software-Development
K1 Gamificación
K1 Gamification
AB Managing technical debt and developing easy-tomaintain software are very important aspects for technological companies. Integrated development environments (IDEs) and static measurement and analysis tools are used for this purpose. Meanwhile, gamification also is gaining popularity in professional settings, particularly in software development. Objective. This paper aims to analyse the improvementin technical debt indicators due to the use of techniques to raise developers’ awareness of technical debt and the introduction of gamification into technical debt management. Method. A quasi-experiment thatmanipulates a training environment with three different treatments was conducted. The first treatment was based on training in the concept of technical debt, bad smells and refactoring, while using multiple pluginsin IDEs to obtain reports on quality indicators of both the code and the tests. The second treatment was based on enriching previous training with the use of SonarQube to continuously raise awareness of technical debt. The third was based on adding a gamification component to technicaldebt management based on a contest with a top ten ranking. The results of the first treatment are compared with the use of SonarQube for continuously raising developers’ awareness of technical debt; while the possible effect of gamification is compared with the results of the previous treatment. Results. It was observed that continuously raising awareness using a technical debt management tool, such as SonarQube, significantly improves the technical debt indicators of the code developed by the participants versus using multiple code and test quality checking tools. On the other hand, incorporating some kind of competition between developers by defining a contest and creating a ranking does not bring about any significant differences in the technical debt indicators. Conclusions. Investment in staff training through tools to raise developers’ awareness of technical debt and incorporating it into continuous integration pipelines does bring improvements in technical debt management.
PB Elsevier
SN 0950-5849
YR 2022
FD 2022-10
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10259/11886
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10259/11886
LA spa
NO This research is based on the work carried out under the Innovation projects of Universidad de Valladolid PID2017/2018-28, PID2018/2019-38. The authors would like to thank the reviewers and Dr. Valentín Cardeñoso for the comments that have served to improve the first versions of this work.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Burgos
RD 02-jul-2026