Technical Debt as indicator for weaknesses in engineering of automated production systems

Abstract

The concept of Technical Debt describes a situation in which a technical compromise is made despite better knowledge. The survey presented delivers insights on Technical Debt in 48 German companies supplying automated production systems. The participating companies do have some immediate benefits from taking Technical Debt under time pressure, but encounter a significant higher long-term additional effort to recover from technical debt. However, awareness for Technical Debt at these companies is low. Therefore, the automated production system manufacturers need to keep a closer eye on expenditure for Technical Debt. The developed survey can be used as a self-assessment method for other companies to compare their results with the average results from this survey.

Technical debt in systems engineering—A systematic literature review

“…Of the 18 sources that are applicable to this study, nine focus on the application of technical debt in the development of automated production systems. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] These studies build upon each other and seek to identify the causes and types of technical debt across the electronic, mechanical, and software components of automated production systems. For example, Vogel-Heuser and Bi 25 expand their research from the realm of automated production systems to mechatronic systems in general and gather empirical data on the occurrence of technical debt within the mechatronic system life cycle, the types of technical debt that are present, and the causes of the technical debt.…”

“…Of the 18 sources that are applicable to this study, nine focus on the application of technical debt in the development of automated production systems 16–24 . These studies build upon each other and seek to identify the causes and types of technical debt across the electronic, mechanical, and software components of automated production systems.…”

“…Similarly, they propose to review technical debt at the end of each increment in an incremental-predictive lifecycle and suggest merging technical debt burndown into the future increments of an iterative-adaptive lifecycle. Dong et al 19 describe how technical debt created in one discipline affects the others throughout the life cycle of automated production systems, but they do not apply technical debt concepts directly to the stages of the life cycle. Vogel-Heuser and Bi 25 show how technical debt is most prevalent early in the lifecycle of mechatronic systems and how different types of technical debt emerge throughout the lifecycle of these systems.…”

The Need for Holistic Technical Debt Management across the Value Stream: Lessons Learnt and Open Challenges

“…Systematic management of debt relations: Although the need for managing debt beyond code and architecture has been observed in the literature, for example in [6,9,18], there is still noticeable need for systematic studies addressing different categories of debt and their relations.…”

Including validation of process control systems’ engineering into the technical debt classification

“…The examined documents include (1) functional specifications and design specifications from different disciplines (e.g. hardware, software, electrical/electronics) following the V-Model, and (2) risk trace matrix and corresponding internal guidelines following GAMP 5. While TD in the classical software engineering domain can be identified with code analysis, the work on TD in the aPS domain is still limited [6]. Recent work on TD identification in the aPS domain still focuses on software discipline [7].…”