Context: The technical debt (TD) metaphor helps to conceptualize the pending issues and trade-offs made during software development. Knowing TD causes can support in defining preventive actions and having information about effects aids in the prioritization of TD payment. Goal: To investigate the impact of the experience level on how practitioners perceive the most likely causes that lead to TD and the effects of TD that have the highest impacts on software projects. Method: We approach this topic by surveying 227 practitioners. Results: While experienced software developers focus on human factors as TD causes and external quality attributes as TD effects, low experienced developers seem to concentrate on technical issues as causes and internal quality issues and increased project effort as effects. Missing any of these types of causes could lead a team to miss the identification of important TD, or miss opportunities to preempt TD. On the other hand, missing important effects could hamper effective planning or erode the effectiveness of decisions about prioritizing TD items. Conclusion: Having software development teams composed of practitioners with a homogeneous experience level can erode the team's ability to effectively manage TD.
Technical debt is the release of immature software to meet time to market. In large complex companies, technical dept drives IT decision, even when participants in the decision-making process do not realize it. In this paper, we propose technical debt visualizations that can serve as a communication platform between different stakeholders. We conducted a case study in a large multi-industry state-owned company that faces significant challenges due to global digital transformation, its rigid control structures, and external pressures for cost reduction and investment optimization. In this study, we designed and evaluated technical debt visualizations to get feedback concerning its usefulness and ease its future acceptance. The results from this case study show that technical debt visualizations were considered useful for decision-making processes associated with software life cycle, especially for executives, business managers, software product owners, architects and project managers.
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