skip to main content
10.1145/2372251.2372297acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesesemConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Managing technical debt in practice: an industrial report

Published: 19 September 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The Technical Debt (TD) metaphor has been used as a way to manage and communicate long-term consequences that some decisions may cause. However the state of the art in TD has not culminated yet in rigorous analysis models for large-scale projects. This work analyses an industrial project, from the perspective of its decisions and related events, so that we can better characterize the existence of TD and show the evolution of its parameters. The project in study had a life cycle of six years (2005-2011) and its data for analysis was collected from emails, documents, CVS logs, code files and interviews with developers and project managers. From this analysis, we identified the factors that had influence on the project decisions and their impact on the system along the time. Furthermore, we were able to extract a set of lessons associated with the characterization of TD in projects of this port.

References

[1]
Cunningham, W. 1992. The WyCash Portfolio Management System, Addendum to the proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, pp.29--30, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
[2]
Seaman, C. and Guo, Y. 2011. Measuring and Monitoring Technical Debt, Advances in Computers, vol. 82, pp. 25--46.
[3]
Brown, N. et al. 2010. Managing Technical Debt in Software-Reliant Systems", Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research, pp. 47--52, New York, NY, USA.
[4]
Buschmann, F. 2011. To Pay or Not to Pay Technical Debt, IEEE Software, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. 29--31.
[5]
Klinger, T., Tarr, P., Wagstrom, P. and Williams, C. 2011. An enterprise Perspective on Technical Debt", Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, pp. 35--38, New York, NY, USA, 2011.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Variability debt in opportunistic reuseJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111969210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Variability Debt: A Multi-method StudyProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3629479.3629513(358-367)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
  • (2023)An initial theory to understand and manage requirements engineering debt in practiceInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107201159(107201)Online publication date: Jul-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ESEM '12: Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
September 2012
338 pages
ISBN:9781450310567
DOI:10.1145/2372251
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 September 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. maintenance
  2. software evolution
  3. technical debt

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ESEM '12
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 130 of 594 submissions, 22%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)13
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Variability debt in opportunistic reuseJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111969210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Variability Debt: A Multi-method StudyProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3629479.3629513(358-367)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
  • (2023)An initial theory to understand and manage requirements engineering debt in practiceInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107201159(107201)Online publication date: Jul-2023
  • (2019)Software Architecture Social Debt: Managing the Incommunicability FactorIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2018.28864336:1(20-37)Online publication date: Feb-2019
  • (2018)Integration of “omics” Data and Phenotypic Data Within a Unified Extensible Multimodal FrameworkFrontiers in Neuroinformatics10.3389/fninf.2018.0009112Online publication date: 18-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Trade-off decisions across time in technical debt managementProceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3194164.3194171(85-94)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
  • (2018)Preventing Technical Debt For Automated Production System Maintenance Using Systematic Change Effort Estimation With Considering Contingent Cost2018 IEEE 16th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN)10.1109/INDIN.2018.8472004(595-601)Online publication date: Jul-2018
  • (2018)Aligning Technical Debt Prioritization with Business Objectives: A Multiple-Case Study2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME.2018.00075(655-664)Online publication date: Sep-2018
  • (2016)Understanding the impact of technical debt in coding and testingProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice10.1145/2897022.2897023(25-31)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
  • (2016)A Financial Approach for Managing Interest in Technical DebtBusiness Modeling and Software Design10.1007/978-3-319-40512-4_7(117-133)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2016
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media