| 1. |
- Besker, Terese, 1970, et al.
(författare)
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How Regulations of Safety-Critical Software Affect Technical Debt
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 45th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2019. ; , s. 74-81
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In recent years in the software industry, the use of safety-critical software is increasing at a rapid rate. However, little is known about the relationship between safety-critical regulations and the management of technical debt. The research is based on interviews with 19 practitioners working in different safety-critical domains implementing software according to different safety regulation standards. The results are three-fold. First, the result shows that performing technical debt refactoring tasks in safety-critical software requires several additional activities and costs, compared to non-safety-critical software. This study has also identified several negative effects due to the impact of these regulatory requirements. Second, the results show that the safety-critical regulations strengthen the implementation of both source code and architecture and thereby initially limit the introduction of technical debt. However, at the same time, the regulations also force the software companies to perform later suboptimal work-around solutions that are counterproductive in achieving a high-quality software since the regulations constrain the possibility of performing optimal TD refactoring activities. Third, the result shows that technical debt refactoring decisions are heavily weighed on the costs associated with the application’s recertification process and that these decisions seldom include the benefits of the refactoring activities in a structured way.
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| 2. |
- Besker, Terese, 1970, et al.
(författare)
-
Software Developer Productivity Loss Due to Technical Debt - A replication and extension study examining developers’ development work
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212. ; 156, s. 41-61
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Software companies need to deliver customer value continuously, both from a short- and long-term perspective. However, software development can be impeded by technical debt (TD). Although significant theoretical work has been undertaken to describe the negative effects of TD, little empirical evidence exists on how much wasted time and additional activities TD causes. The study aims to explore the consequences of TD in terms of wastage of development time. This study investigates on which activities this wasted time is spent and whether different TD types impact the wasted time differently. This study reports the results of a longitudinal study surveying 43 developers and including16 interviews followed by validation by an additional study using a different and independent dataset and focused on replicating the findings addressing the findings. The analysis of the reported wasted time revealed that developers waste, on average, 23% of their time due to TD and that developers are frequently forced to introduce new TD. The most common activity on which additional time is spent is performing additional testing. The study provides evidence that TD hinders developers by causing an excessive waste of working time, where the wasted time negatively affects productivity.
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| 3. |
- Besker, Terese, 1970, et al.
(författare)
-
Technical Debt Triage in Backlog Management
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Technical Debt, TechDebt 2019. ; , s. 13-22
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Remediation of technical debt through regular refactoring initiatives is considered vital for the software system's long and healthy life. However, since today’s software companies face increasing pressure to deliver customer value continuously, the balance between spending developer time, effort, and resources on implementing new features or spending it on refactoring of technical debt becomes vital. The goal of this study is to explore how the prioritization of technical debt is carried out by practitioners within today’s software industry. This study also investigates what factors influence the prioritization process and its related challenges. This paper reports the results of surveying 17 software practitioners, together with follow-up interviews with them. Our results show that there is no uniform way of prioritizing technical debt and that it is commonly done reactively without applying any explicit strategies. Often, technical debt issues are managed and prioritized in a shadow backlog, separate from the official sprint backlog. This study was also able to identify several different challenges related to prioritizing technical debt, such as the lack of quantitative information about the technical debt items and that the refactoring of technical debt issues competes with the implementation of customer requirements.
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