Technical Debt indication in PLC Code for automated Production Systems: Introducing a Domain Specific Static Code Analysis Tool

摘要

Nowadays, technical debt (TD) has become a well-known metaphor signifying long-term consequences of short-term benefits in system development. Accumulating TD can cause severe maintenance effort, and thus affect the quality of the system. Identifying and managing TD through appropriate methods and tools can be a first step towards preventing TD accumulation. Static code analysis is a technique widely used to identify TD at code level in software engineering domain and various tools were developed accordingly. However, tools for identifying TD in technical systems such as automated production systems (aPS) that are mainly controlled by Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) implemented in IEC 61131-3 programming languages are rare. Therefore, this paper presents a tool that uses static code analysis with the application of software quality metrics and coding conventions enabling the PLC software developer to identify TD and evaluate it.