Technical debt reduction using epsilon-Nash equilibrium for the perturbed software refactor game model Online publication date: Mon, 11-Oct-2021
by Vimaladevi Madhivanan; Zayaraz Godandapani
International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences (IJIDS), Vol. 13, No. 3, 2021
Abstract: Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor that is one of the reasons for software to become obsolete. The process of refactoring can be effectively applied to reduce the technical debt and the improvement of other vital quality attributes such as abstraction, inheritance and coupling. This paper discusses a refactoring model that can be applied for an object oriented software system for improved quality by applying the concepts of game theory. A multi-player perturbed software refactor game model is developed, that models inheritance, abstraction, coupling and the technical debt, as multiple players of the game. An optimal strategy for refactoring the source code is arrived by calculating the ε-Nash equilibrium of the perturbed game. The results attained are compared against the popular genetic algorithm (GA), artificial bee colony (ABC) and simulated annealing (SA) optimisation algorithms, taking three open source Java project samples.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences (IJIDS):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook