Technical Debt in Large-Scale Distributed Projects: An Industrial Case Study

Abstract

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor that refects the technical compromises that sacrifce the long-term health of a software product to achieve short term beneft. It is important to manage TD to avoid software degradation. In large-scale distributed projects, technical debt management (TDM) becomes more complex and challenging. There is a lack of empirical studies on the TD accumulation in large-scale distributed projects. Then, to address this gap, we conducted a case study in Ericsson (a European Telecom Company) to identify the relationship between TD accumulation and factors such as task complexity, lead time, total of developers, and task scaling. We used data from 33 projects extracted from managerial documents to conduct a regression analysis. We also conducted interviews with seniors developers of the team to interpret the results. We found out that Task Complexity has a strong relationship (p-value = 5.69 × 10 −5 ) with Technical Debt, while Global Distance was mentioned by the interviewees as a relevant factor for TD accumulation (although not statistically signifcant in our regression analysis). Practitioners should consider avoiding complex/big tasks, breaking down big tasks into small ones (if possible). We also plan to analyze other projects in this company to confrm our fndings further.