Research On Software Requirement Changes Technical Debt

In the entire life cycle of the software,the requirement is constantly changing.Particularly in the evolutionary process of the large-scale software project version,every day too many change requirements are requested by the user or the developer.The HADOOP issue tracking system has recorded more than 12,000 change requirement reports.How to properly handle these change requirements and accurately estimate their impact has become a problem.We observed in the study that some of the requirement changes because of being handled inappropriately,and triggered follow-up problems.Technical debt is used to describe this problem of solving the short-term while having resulted in the accumulation of long-term consequences.The technical debt introduced by the requirement change is defined as requirement changes technical debt.Based on different ways of generating debt,the requirement changes technical debt is divided into two basic types.One is the requirement change delayed to achieve,seemingly no impact in short-term but having owed the debt and then hindering the development of software;the other is the requirement change forced to achieve rapidly,resulting in the accumulation of late maintenance costs due to introducing a new technical debt without mature technical methods or comprehensive consideration.These two kinds of requirement changes technical debt have caused unpredictable consequences on the long-term development of the software.In this paper,we used the JIRA(issue tracking system)used by the large open source software HADOOP to obtain the massive change requirement data,locate the requirement changes technical debt,quantify the requirement changes technical debt according to the defined method,and use Gephi to visualize the data,making the requirement changes technical debt in the project be clear at a glance.Finally,we analyzed and studied the biggest requirement debt HADOOP-4487 which had existed in the project.The purpose of this paper is to identify,quantify and rank the requirement changes technical debt to make the project management understand the debt situation existed in the project and then decide which requirement change should be given priority to achieve,when to achieve and how to achieve.