Social debt in software engineering: insights from industry

Abstract

Social debt is analogous to technical debt in many ways: it represents the state of software development organisations as the result of "accumulated" decisions. In the case of social debt, decisions are about people and their interactions. Our objective was to study the causality around social debt in practice. In so doing, we conducted exploratory qualitative research in a large software company. We found many forces together causing social debt; we represented them in a framework, and captured anti-patterns that led to the debt in the first place. Finally, we elicited best practices that technicians adopted to pay back some of the accumulated debt. We learned that social debt is strongly correlated with technical debt and both forces should be reckoned with together during the software process.

Architecture Design Decision Maps for Software Sustainability

“…For example, good references include the work of: Cai et al [5], which uses the notion of design rules to detect flows at the software architecture level over extended periods of time [technical sustainability]; Hindle [11] relating the direct impact of software change on energy consumption, and Li et al [17] presenting practices that indirectly (i.e. if adopted by developers) can help reducing the energy consumption of mobile applications [environmental sustainability]; Widdicks et al [27] study socio-technical sustainability at the individual level, while Tamburri et al [22] do so at the level of development teams and whole organizations [social sustainability]. Our work is orthogonal to the ones above, as decision maps can be used to frame the concerns of each of the sustainability aspects they address, and provide a higher level picture on their interdependencies.…”

Editorial: Thematic series on software engineering from a social network perspective

“…Tamburri et al [22] in the paper "Social debt in software engineering: insights from industry" investigated how accumulated sub-optimal decisions about people and their interactions turn into social debt, in a similar fashion in technical debt is accrued [25]. While technical debt has received a lot of attention over the years, social debt has remained relatively unexplored.…”

“…In this thematic series, researchers investigated how popular social network sites can be used to support requirement engineering [21]; how software engineering social networks lead to social debt [22]; how interactions are mined from software repositories to understand how companies collaborate and compete [23]; how complex information systems can be analyzed from a sociotechnical perspective [14]; how prestige in a social network correlates to socio-economic data [24]; and how a social networking site can support a professional development community. In the next section, we give a brief overview of each selected paper before we explain the selection process.…”

Gender Diversity and Women in Software Teams: How Do They Affect Community Smells?

“…Software development is an inherently social activity, and as such, the way developers communicate and collaborate can be expected to, and has been found to affect software quality [1], [2]. Several recent studies have focused on the so-called "community smells", patterns indicating suboptimal organization and communication of software development teams that can lead to unforeseen project costs [3]. Community smells have been also linked to code smells, indications of poor design, coding, and implementation choices [4], [5].…”

“…We seek therefore to verify our conjecture, and assess the role of gender diversity and women participation on community smells. More specifically, in this study we consider four of the community smells defined and operationalized by Tamburri et al [3], [4], i.e., Organizational Silo, Black Cloud, Lone Wolf, and Radio Silence. All of them refer to suboptimal characteristics of a development community that might be mitigated by the presence of women.…”