| 1. |
- Besker, Terese, 1970, et al.
(författare)
-
The use of incentives to promote technical debt management
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Information and Software Technology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0950-5849 .- 1873-6025. ; 142
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: When developing software, it is vitally important to keep the level of technical debt down since, based on several studies, it has been well established that technical debt can lower the development productivity, decrease the developers' morale and compromise the overall quality of the software, among others. 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. Objective: This study aims to understand how software companies give incentives to manage technical debt. This is carried out by exploring how companies encourage and reward practitioners for actively keeping the level of technical debt down add whether the companies use any forcing or penalising initiatives when managing technical debt. Method: As a first step, this paper reports the results of both an online survey providing quantitative data from 258 participants and interviews with 32 software practitioners. As a second step, this study sets out to specifically provide a detailed assessment of additional and in-depth analysis of technical debt management strategies based on an encouraging mindset and attitude from both managers and technical roles to understand how, when and by whom such strategies are adopted in practice. Results: Our findings show that having a technical debt management strategy (specially based on encouragement) can significantly impact the amount of technical debt related to the software. Conclusion: The result indicates that there is considerable unfulfilled potential to influence how software practitioners can further limit and reduce technical debt by adopting a strategy based explicitly on an encouraging mindset from managers where they also specifically dedicate time and resources for technical debt remediation activities.
|
|
| 2. |
- Martini, Antonio, et al.
(författare)
-
Technical debt tracking: Current state of practice: A survey and multiple case study in 15 large organizations
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Accelerating Digital Transformation: 10 Years of Software Center. - 9783031108730 ; , s. 87-118
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Large software companies need to support continuous and fast delivery of customer value both in the short and long term. However, this can be hindered if both the evolution and maintenance of existing systems are hampered by Technical Debt. Although a lot of theoretical work on Technical Debt has been produced recently, its practical management lacks empirical studies. In this paper, we investigate the state of practice in several companies to understand what the cost of managing TD is, what tools are used to track TD, and how a tracking process is introduced in practice. We combined two phases: a survey involving 226 respondents from 15 organizations and an in-depth multiple case study in three organizations including 13 interviews and 79 Technical Debt issues. We selected the organizations where Technical Debt was better tracked in order to distill best practices. We found that the development time dedicated to managing Technical Debt is substantial (an average of 25% of the overall development), but mostly not systematic: only a few participants (26%) use a tool, and only 7.2% methodically track Technical Debt. We found that the most used and effective tools are currently backlogs and static analyzers. By studying the approaches in the companies participating in the case study, we report how companies start tracking Technical Debt and what the initial benefits and challenges are. Finally, we propose a Strategic Adoption Model for the introduction of tracking Technical Debt in software organizations.
|
|
