The Pandora's box of social, process, and people debts in software engineering

Abstract

In software engineering, technical debt (TD) has been widely investigated, but debt regarding social issues, people, and processes has not been explored as much. It should be noted here that we use nontechnical debt (NTD) as an umbrella term to cover social, process, and people debts. Although the number of studies on NTD in software is increasing, the majority of them are descriptive rather than rigorous, and there is no systematic development of cumulative knowledge. As a result, identifying the fundamental causes of NTD and the associated mitigation techniques in software engineering is challenging. Therefore, this study investigates the scientific evidence regarding NTD till date by conducting a systematic mapping review of software engineering research between January 2000 and October 2021. The search strategy resulted in 175 studies, 17 of which were identified as unique and relevant primary papers. The primary studies show that NTD and TD are inextricably linked. In addition, this study also captured a plethora of causes and mitigation strategies for managing NTD and thus makes four important contributions: (i) highlighting state‐of‐the‐art NTD research; (ii) identification of the reported causes and mitigation strategies in the primary papers; and (iii) determination of opportunities for future NTD research.

Collaboration Challenges in the Adoption of Scrum: A Study in Software Development Teams from Departamento del Cauca, Colombia

“…En [24] se aborda la deuda no técnica (NTD) en ingeniería de software, un tema que no ha recibido la misma atención que la deuda técnica cuando se trata de deudas relacionadas con aspectos sociales, procesos y personas. El análisis comparativo entre las investigaciones sobre la deuda no técnica (NTD) en ingeniería de software y el presente estudio ofrece valiosas perspectivas sobre la importancia de la colaboración y la gestión efectiva de los aspectos sociales, procesos y personas en entornos de desarrollo de software.…”

Identifying and Categorizing Challenges in Large-Scale Agile Software Development Projects: Insights from Two Swedish Companies

“…Testing strategies such as integration, regression and user acceptance testing are significant challenges for case companies. Such test challenges lead to "test debt" [3]. Second, the teams encountered sprint-related challenges, which Ahmad and Tomas categorised as non-technical debt [3].…”

“…Larger companies typically have fewer interactions with their customers than smaller ones, making the customer unsatisfied at the time of delivery [21]. Kalenda et al [17] [3] highlighted that resistance to change and integration with non-agile business processes are critical challenges in agile scaling.…”

“…Despite the growing research on large-scale agile software development, existing studies lack empirical evidence and require further investigations [10] [17] [11] [14] [3]. Most of the case studies available are focused on the transition challenges of agile in large-scale projects [8].…”

Organizational Debt in Large-Scale Hybrid Agile Software Development: A Case Study on Coordination Mechanisms

“…For example, the debt metaphor has also been used in requirements engineering [11]. Ahmad and Gustavsson [1] recently conducted a systematic mapping review on nontechnical debt in software engineering and found 17 studies that investigate social, process, and people debts. They reported that both [8,17] found lack of communication, collaboration and coordination to be the cause of social debt.…”