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An outlook on Technical Debt Management

Reducing Friction in Software Development

Paris Avgeriou, Philippe Kruchten, Robert Nord, Ipek Ozkaya, Carolyn Seaman

paris@cs.rug.nl

State of the art

› From source code to the whole lifecycle

› Glossaries and ontologies (convergent)

› Tooling (industrial & prototypes)

› Economic theories

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State of practice

SW engineers

› Understand the concept and challenges

› Deal with it during maintenance

› TD management in place

• Resource-intensive

• Realistically only a portion managed

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Main thesis

› Technical debt grows

› Managing TD is dominant in SW evolution

• Established as a core SE practice

› It’s the next big thing

++ Investment

-- Bankruptcy

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A perfect storm?

For every 100 KLOC an average software application had approximately US$361,000 of technical debt*

*B. Curtis et al. “Estimating the Principal of an Application’s TD,” IEEE Software ‘12

Is this really new?

Communities

› Maintenance & evolution

› Reengineering / refactoring

Terms

› Aging

› Decay

› Sustainability

› Little progress

› “Dull” topic

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Convergence

› Program analysis/comprehension

› SW Quality measurement

› Qualitative research methods

› SW risk management

› Industry-academia

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Research output is soaring

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Z. Li et al., A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management, JSS 2015

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4 ways to prepare for the storm

1. Management process

› TD prevention

› TD identification

› TD measurement

› TD prioritization

› TD monitoring

› TD repayment

› TD documentation

› TD communication

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Li et al., Architectural Debt Management in Value-oriented Architecting, Elsevier ‘14

2. Software Economics

› Mimic economics data-driven focus

• Availability of rich data

› Investment strategies

› Assign business value to intrinsic qualities

› Bridge the communication divide

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3. Design and Architecture

› Acknowledge elephant in the room

• Main concerns stem from architecture

• But hard to detect automatically

› Architecture backlog

› Traceability with code

› Architecture evaluations and refactoring

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4. TD in the curriculum

› “No bugs found” vs.

• Internal qualities

• Trading off features with qualities

• Decisions as investments

› Throughout the SE courses

• Brownfield projects

• Linked with software economics

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