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Proceedings Paper

Use of SQALE and tools for analysis and identification of code technical debt through static analysis

Publicated to:8th Iberian Conference On Information Systems And Technologies, Cisti 2013. - 2017-07-11 (), DOI: 10.23919/CISTI.2017.7975677

Authors: Guaman, Daniel; Alejandro Quezada-Sarmiento, Pablo; Barba-Guaman, Luis; Enciso, Liliana

Affiliations

Abstract

Technical Debt (TD), also known as technical debt design or technical debt code, analyze the consequence that could have a system once it has been designed architecturally, coding or implemented. TD refers to work to be performed rather than software design or coding is considered complete or correct. Static analysis is a technique to identify and analyze software characteristics from source code; through static analysis we can identify elements such as packages, classes, relationships, lines of code (LOC's), bugs, complexity, coding violations and others. In addition subsystems, components and their relationships supported by tools, algorithms, frameworks to analyze the code were identified. SQALE[1] is a quality and analysis model contains the internal properties expected from the code in the context of the evaluation, it has been used to perform many assessments of software source code, of various sizes in different application domains and programming language. SonarQube[2], Kiuwan[3] and PMD[4] are an open source platform to manage the source code quality, this cover seven axes of code quality among which stand: architecture and design, duplications, unit test, complexity, potential bugs, codifications rules, comments, among others; this platform work with over 20 programming languages. This paper, use as input the source code of the software applications written in different programming language for through static analysis identify metrics, characteristics, and technical debt with the aim to improve the quality when writing code, also supported in static analysis identify aspects such as correct apply of quality attributes, standards and best practices of programming that based in ISO 9126 and SQALE ensure the correct software development in terms of design and coding.

Keywords

Quality attributesSonarqubeSource codeSqaleStatic analysisTechnical debt

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal 8th Iberian Conference On Information Systems And Technologies, Cisti 2013 due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency Scopus (SJR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2017, it was in position , thus managing to position itself as a Q2 (Segundo Cuartil), in the category Computer Networks and Communications.

Independientemente del impacto esperado determinado por el canal de difusión, es importante destacar el impacto real observado de la propia aportación.

Según las diferentes agencias de indexación, el número de citas acumuladas por esta publicación hasta la fecha 2025-05-30:

  • Scopus: 2
  • OpenCitations: 1

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-05-30:

  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 26 (PlumX).

Leadership analysis of institutional authors

This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Ecuador.

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (GUAMAN CORONEL, DANIEL ALEJANDRO) .