Managing technical debt in software-reliant systems

Abstract

Delivering increasingly complex software-reliant systems demands better ways to manage the long-term effects of shortterm expedients. The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the agile development community as a way to understand and communicate such issues. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (e.g., modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (e.g., a deadline), and that such compromises incur a "debt": on which "interest" has to be paid and which the "principal" should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project. We argue that the software engineering research community has an opportunity to study and improve this concept. We can offer software engineers a foundation for managing such trade-offs based on models of their economic impacts. Therefore, we propose managing technical debt as a part of the future research agenda for the software engineering field

Seeking Technical Debt in Critical Software Development Projects: An Exploratory Field Study

“…For example, according to [16], planned tests are often neglected or postponed due to insufficient amount of time. A group of studies use the metaphor of technical debt [19] to explain such quality compromising trade-offs [15,17,21,22].…”

“…In such situations, developers are often forced or motivated to cut back on software development processes or to postpone certain activities [17,18]. The metaphor of technical debt [19] has been increasingly used to point out such quality compromising shortcuts [15,17,[20][21][22].…”

“…Since technical debt has a negative impact on software quality, it must be avoided when developing critical systems. However, previous studies showed that technical debt does not always occur because of bad design and development decisions but also due to environmental factors that cannot be controlled by development teams [17,21]. Therefore, it is important for development teams to identify sources of technical debt in their context and to properly manage it in order to maintain software quality [20].…”

“…While in recent years technical debt has received considerable attention from the agile community [20,21,25,26], to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that explore this phenomenon in critical software projects. As it is suggested by [21], there is a need for empirical studies to investigate the potential sources of technical debt across development contexts.…”

“…As it is suggested by [21], there is a need for empirical studies to investigate the potential sources of technical debt across development contexts. Therefore, we performed an exploratory field study to gain a better understanding of the nature of technical debt and its potential sources in critical domains.…”