Logo image
Back
Managing technical debt in software-reliant systems
Conference proceeding

Managing technical debt in software-reliant systems

Nanette Brown, Yuanfang Cai, Yuepu Guo, Rick Kazman, Miryung Kim, Philippe Kruchten, Erin Lim, Alan MacCormack, Robert Nord, Ipek Ozkaya, …
Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on future of software engineering research
07 Nov 2010
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1882362.1882373

Abstract

cost-benefit analysis design decision trade-off large-scale system development software metrics technical debt
Delivering increasingly complex software-reliant systems demands better ways to manage the long-term effects of short-term expedients. The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the agile development community as a way to understand and communicate such issues. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (e.g., modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (e.g., a deadline), and that such compromises incur a "debt": on which "interest" has to be paid and which the "principal" should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project. We argue that the software engineering research community has an opportunity to study and improve this concept. We can offer software engineers a foundation for managing such trade-offs based on models of their economic impacts. Therefore, we propose managing technical debt as a part of the future research agenda for the software engineering field.

Metrics

15 Record Views
314 citations in Scopus

Details

Logo image