Profiling Developers Through the Lens of Technical Debt

TL;DR

This paper analyzes developer behaviors related to technical debt management by mining commit data, code smells, and refactoring activities to profile individual developers and understand their roles and maturity levels.

Contribution

It introduces a method to profile developers based on their technical debt management activities using mined data from version control and code analysis.

Findings

Identifies prolific coders and their technical debt handling patterns.

Discriminates developer roles based on technical debt activities.

Estimates coding maturity and technical debt tolerance levels.

Abstract

Context: Technical Debt needs to be managed to avoid disastrous consequences, and investigating developers' habits concerning technical debt management is invaluable information in software development. Objective: This study aims to characterize how developers manage technical debt based on the code smells they induce and the refactorings they apply. Method: We mined a publicly-available Technical Debt dataset for Git commit information, code smells, coding violations, and refactoring activities for each developer of a selected project. Results: By combining this information, we profile developers to recognize prolific coders, highlight activities that discriminate among developer roles (reviewer, lead, architect), and estimate coding maturity and technical debt tolerance.