Exploring the costs of technical debt management – a case study

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• 作者：Yuepu Guo ; Rodrigo Oliveira Spínola ; Carolyn Seaman
• 关键词：Technical debt ; Decision making ; Cost ; Case study
• 刊名：Empirical Software Engineering
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：February 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：21
• 期：1
• 页码：159-182
• 全文大小：775 KB
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• 作者单位：Yuepu Guo (1)
  Rodrigo Oliveira Spínola (2) (3)
  Carolyn Seaman (1)
  
  1. Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA
  2. Department of Systems and Computing, University of Salvador, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
  3. Fraunhofer Project Center for Software and System Engineering at Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
  
• 刊物类别：Computer Science
• 刊物主题：Software Engineering, Programming and Operating Systems
  Programming Languages, Compilers and Interpreters
  
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-7616

文摘

Technical debt is a metaphor for delayed software maintenance tasks. Incurring technical debt may bring short-term benefits to a project, but such benefits are often achieved at the cost of extra work in future, analogous to paying interest on the debt. Currently technical debt is managed implicitly, if at all. However, on large systems, it is too easy to lose track of delayed tasks or to misunderstand their impact. Therefore, we have proposed a new approach to managing technical debt, which we believe to be helpful for software managers to make informed decisions. In this study we explored the costs of the new approach by tracking the technical debt management activities in an on-going software project. The results from the study provided insights into the impact of technical debt management on software projects. In particular, we found that there is a significant start-up cost when beginning to track and monitor technical debt, but the cost of ongoing management soon declines to very reasonable levels. Keywords Technical debt Decision making Cost Case study