Dataset: A continuous open source data collection platform for architectural technical debt assessment

The dataset and replication package of the study "A continuous open source data collection platform for architectural technical debt assessment".

Abstract

Architectural decisions are the most important source of technical debt.  In recent years, researchers spent an increasing amount of effort investigating this specific category of technical debt, with quantitative methods, and in particular static analysis, being the most common approach to investigate such a topic.

However, quantitative studies are susceptible, to varying degrees, to external validity threats, which hinder the generalisation of their findings.

In response to this concern, researchers strive to expand the scope of their study by incorporating a larger number of projects into their analyses. This practice is typically executed on a case-by-case basis, necessitating substantial data collection efforts that have to be repeated for each new study.

To address this issue, this paper presents our initial attempt at tackling this problem and enabling researchers to study architectural smells at large scale, a well-known indicator of architectural technical debt. Specifically, we introduce a novel approach to data collection pipeline that leverages Apache Airflow to continuously generate up-to-date, large-scale datasets using Arcan, a tool for architectural smells detection (or any other tool).

Finally, we present the publicly-available dataset resulting from the first three months of execution of the pipeline, that includes over 30,000 analysed commits and releases from over 10,000 open source GitHub projects written in 5 different programming languages and amounting to over a billion of lines of code analysed.