| 1. |
- Besker, Terese, 1970, et al.
(författare)
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Carrot and Stick approaches when managing Technical Debt
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Technical Debt, TechDebt 2020. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 21-30
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When developing software, it is vitally important to keep the level of technical debt down since it is well established from several studies that technical debt can, e.g., lower the development productivity, decrease the developers’ morale, and compromise the overall quality of the software. However, even if researchers and practitioners working in today's software development industry are quite familiar with the concept of technical debt and its related negative consequences, there has been no empirical research focusing specifically on how software managers actively communicate and manage the need to keep the level of technical debt as low as possible. This paper aims to explore how software companies encourage and reward practitioners for actively keeping the level of technical debt down and also whether the companies use any forcing or penalizing initiatives when managing technical debt. This paper reports the results of both an online web-survey provided quantitative data from 258 participants and follow-up interviews with 32 industrial software practitioners. The findings show that having a TD management strategy can significantly impact the amount of TD in the software. When surveying how commonly used different TD management strategies are, we found that only the encouraging strategy is, to some extent, adopted in today's’ software industry. This study also provides a model describing the four assessed strategies by presenting its strategies and tactics, together with recommendations on how they could be operationalized in today’s software companies.
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| 2. |
- Besker, Terese, 1970
(författare)
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Technical Debt: An empirical investigation of its harmfulness and on management strategies in industry
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Background: In order to survive in today's fast-growing and ever fast-changing business environment, software companies need to continuously deliver customer value, both from a short- and long-term perspective. However, the consequences of potential long-term and far-reaching negative effects of shortcuts and quick fixes made during the software development lifecycle, described as Technical Debt (TD), can impede the software development process. Objective: The overarching goal of this Ph.D. thesis is twofold. The first goal is to empirically study and understand in what way and to what extent, TD influences today’s software development work, specifically with the intention to provide more quantitative insight into the field. Second, to understand which different initiatives can reduce the negative effects of TD and also which factors are important to consider when implementing such initiatives. Method: To achieve the objectives, a combination of both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies are used, including interviews, surveys, a systematic literature review, a longitudinal study, analysis of documents, correlation analysis, and statistical tests. In seven of the eleven studies included in this Ph.D. thesis, a combination of multiple research methods are used to achieve high validity. Results: We present results showing that software suffering from TD will cause various negative effects on both the software and the developing process. These negative effects are illustrated from a technical, financial, and a developer’s working situational perspective. These studies also identify several initiatives that can be undertaken in order to reduce the negative effects of TD. Conclusion: The results show that software developers report that they waste 23% of their working time due to experiencing TD and that TD required them to perform additional time-consuming work activities. This study also shows that, compared to all types of TD, architectural TD has the greatest negative impact on daily software development work and that TD has negative effects on several different software quality attributes. Further, the results show that TD reduces developer morale. Moreover, the findings show that intentionally introducing TD in startup companies can allow the startups to cut development time, enabling faster feedback and increased revenue, preserve resources, and decrease risk and thereby contribute to beneficial effects. This study also identifies several initiatives that can be undertaken in order to reduce the negative effects of TD, such as the introduction of a tracking process where the TD items are introduced in an official backlog. The finding also indicates that there is an unfulfilled potential regarding how managers can influence the manner in which software practitioners address TD.
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| 3. |
- Besker, Terese, 1970, et al.
(författare)
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The Influence of Technical Debt on Software Developer Morale
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212. ; 167
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: Previous research in the Technical Debt (TD) field has mainly focused on the technical and economic aspects, while its human aspect has received minimal attention. Objective: This paper aims to understand how software developers’ morale is influenced by TD and how their morale is influenced by TD management activities. Furthermore, this study correlates the morale with the amount of wastage of time due to TD. Method: Firstly, we conducted 15 interviews with professionals, and, secondly, these data were complemented with a survey. Thirdly, we collected 473 data points from 43 developers reporting their amount of wasted time. The collected data were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative techniques, including thematic and statistical analysis. Results: Our results show that the occurrence of TD is associated with a lack of progress and waste of time. This might have a negative influence on developers’ morale. Further, management of TD seems to have a positive influence on developers’ morale. Conclusions: The results highlight the effects TD has on practitioners’ software work. This study presents results indicating that software suffering from TD reduces developers’ morale and thereby also their productivity. However, our results also indicate that TD management increases developers’ morale and developer productivity.
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| 4. |
- Lenarduzzi, Valentina, et al.
(författare)
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Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212. ; 171
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring of Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review of 557 unique papers published until 2019, following a consolidated methodology applied in software engineering. We included 44 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and proposing optimization regarding different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We present an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that Technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what the important factors are and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive. In this paper, we therefore outline different directions for necessary future investigations.
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| 5. |
- Martini, Antonio, 1982, et al.
(författare)
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Process Debt: a First Exploration
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings - Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC. - 1530-1362. ; 2020-December, s. 316-325
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Process Debt, like Technical Debt, can be the source of short-term benefits but often is harmful in the long term for a software organization. However, we do not know much about Process Debt from current literature. We conducted an exploratory study of Process Debt in four international organizations by interviewing 16 practitioners. The findings show that Process Debt can be a harmful phenomenon that needs attention and new practices, as it is different from Technical Debt. We provide an initial framework, composed by a definition and a conceptual model for Process Debt, showing types, causes, consequences, and debt accumulation patterns.
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