Sulla precisione della sforzo stimato con SonarQube. Analisi sullo sviluppo di un'applicazione ferroviaria. = On the accuracy of estimation effort with SonarQube. Analysis on development of a railway application

Software companies spend a lot of resources in improving software qualities and remove everything that can lead to technical issue. The result of the efforts is the creation of documentation conventions and specific coding standard. At the same time, these companies need to reduce the time to market for the product in order to decrease the development cost and the global expenses. Such demands entail the developers to resort the use of fast and unrefined solutions that later needs to be refactored. These actions introduce in the development process unwanted cost that are only visible in the future. These activities are referred as “technical debt”. The introduction of technical debt implies that the companies have the need to measure the consequences in term of time and expenses in order to avoid unexpected behavior during the develpment of the product. A precise measure of the above requested effort is not possible due to the com- plexity of the projects and the differences between languages and technologies. Several methods have been proposed to retrieve an estimation from a set of ob- jective metrics describing the state of the code. Usually companies adopt static analysis tool to measure software quality and the presence of issues. Among the different tools available, in this study we choose to adopt Sonar- Qube. The tool analyses the code and check if it is compliant against a set of coding standard and each violation is considered as an item. Each item defines a set of information about itself, and moreover considers the time needed to refactor the code in order to eliminate the violation retrieved. Analysis about the diffusion and the impact of technical debt issues in software system have already been per- formed. Various studies proposed approaches to obtain a precise estimation of the remediation time. Following the methodologies introduced, this study aims to re- port the analysis made on a real-word experience developing a proprietary software with closed-source code base. We decide to follow the life-cycle of a proprietary and close-source project because it represent a very common case in the industry. The goal of the study is to compare the collected data with the results of pre- vious studies. We investigate the accuracy of the estimation on remediation effort proposed by the tool SonarQube related to the actual remediation time invested by the developers team. Consecutively, we evaluate the impact of the tool related to customer indications.