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TechDebt '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt
ACM2018 Proceeding
Publisher:
  • Association for Computing Machinery
  • New York
  • NY
  • United States
Conference:
ICSE '18: 40th International Conference on Software Engineering Gothenburg Sweden May 27 - 28, 2018
ISBN:
978-1-4503-5713-5
Published:
27 May 2018
Sponsors:
SIGSOFT, IEEE-CS
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Abstract

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the International Conference on Technical Debt, TechDebt 2018, co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Göteborg, Sweden.

Technical debt describes a universal software development phenomenon: design or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term but set up a technical context that can make future changes more costly or impossible. Software developers and managers increasingly use the concept to communicate key trade-offs related to release and quality issues.

The Managing Technical Debt workshop series has provided a forum since 2010 for practitioners and researchers to discuss issues related to technical debt and share emerging practices used in software-development organizations. A week-long Dagstuhl Seminar on Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering has produced a consensus definition for technical debt, a draft conceptual model, and a research roadmap.

To accelerate progress, an expanded two-day working conference format has become essential. The goal of this two-day conference is to bring together leading software researchers, practitioners, and tool vendors to explore theoretical and practical techniques that manage technical debt.

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SESSION: Incurring debt
research-article
An exploratory study on the influence of developers in technical debt

Software systems are often developed by many developers who have a varying range of skills and habits. These developers have a big impact on software quality. Understanding how different developers and developer characteristics impact the quality of a ...

research-article
Architectural technical debt identification: the research landscape

Architectural Technical Debt (ATD) regards sub-optimal design decisions that bring short-term benefits to the cost of long-term gradual deterioration of the quality of the architecture of a software system. The identification of ATD strongly influences ...

SESSION: Assessing debt
research-article
Technical debt as an external software attribute

Background: Technical debt is currently receiving increasing attention from practitioners and researchers. Several metaphors, concepts, and indications concerning technical debt have been introduced, but no agreement exists about a solid definition of ...

research-article
Prioritizing technical debt in database normalization using portfolio theory and data quality metrics

Database normalization is the one of main principles for designing relational databases. The benefits of normalization can be observed through improving data quality and performance, among the other qualities. We explore a new context of technical debt ...

research-article
Evaluating domain-specific metric thresholds: an empirical study

Software metrics and thresholds provide means to quantify several quality attributes of software systems. Indeed, they have been used in a wide variety of methods and tools for detecting different sorts of technical debts, such as code smells. ...

SESSION: Tools track
abstract
Introducing debtgrep, a tool for fighting technical debt in base station software

One of the biggest challenges in a large software development project is to manage technical debt. For example, if an API is replaced by a newer version and the old one is deprecated, there is a big risk that a substantial technical debt is incurred. ...

abstract
Static software metrics for reliability and maintainability

This paper identifies a small, essential set of static software code metrics linked to the software product quality characteristics of reliability and maintainability and to the most commonly identified sources of technical debt. An open-source plug-in ...

abstract
Anacondebt: a tool to assess and track technical debt

It is challenging to assess and manage Technical Debt. Technical Debt is avoided or refactored if the long-term benefits, such as preventing extra-costs, exceed the cost of repaying the debt.

Some tools have been recently proposed for the identification ...

abstract
Cognitive complexity: an overview and evaluation

As a measure of understandability, Cyclomatic Complexity is widely regarded as unsatisfactory, but until December 2016 it was the only one available. This paper describes Cognitive Complexity, a new metric designed specifically to measure ...

abstract
Prioritize technical debt in large-scale systems using codescene

Large-scale systems often contain considerable amounts of code that is overly complicated, hard to understand, and hence expensive to change. An organization cannot address and refactor all of that code at once, nor should they. Ideally, actionable ...

SESSION: Managing the debt I (short papers)
abstract
The past, present and future of technical debt: learning from the past to prepare for the future

While technical debt has emerged as a formal concept relatively recently [2] we have had technical debt from the earliest days of software development, it has simply evolved in nature. So what can we learn from past types of technical debt to allow us ...

short-paper
The developer's dilemma: factors affecting the decision to repay code debt

The set of concepts collectively known as Technical Debt (TD) assume that software liabilities set up a context that can make a future change more costly or impossible; and therefore repaying the debt should be pursued. However, software developers ...

short-paper
From lasagna to spaghetti, a decision model to manage defect debt

In this paper, we propose a model that formalizes the role of software evolution in characterizing Technical Debt (TD) by defining a series of software product states, where each successive state represents an increased level of maintenance code churn, ...

short-paper
A proposed sizing model for managing 3rd party code technical debt

Commercial software development projects frequently build code on third-party components. However, depending on third-party code requires that projects keep current with the latest version of each component. When projects do not stay current, they begin ...

SESSION: Managing the debt II
research-article
Governing technology debt: beyond technical debt

Technical debt has successfully captured the interest of practitioners and researchers alike. We argue that the concept of technical debt holds much more currency within the strategic Information Systems literature. Hence, we have developed a research ...

research-article
Trade-off decisions across time in technical debt management: a systematic literature review

Technical Debt arises from decisions that favour short-term outcomes at the cost of longer-term disadvantages. They may be taken knowingly or based on missing or incomplete awareness of the costs; they are taken in different roles, situations, stages ...

research-article
Design debt prioritization: a design best practice-based approach

Technical debt (TD) in a software system is a metaphor that tries to illustrate the remediation effort of the already introduced quality deficit and the impact thereof to the business value of the system. To address TD, various management activities are ...

SESSION: Practice in industry
research-article
Technical debt cripples software developer productivity: a longitudinal study on developers' daily software development work

Software companies need to continuously deliver customer value, both from a short- and long-term perspective. However, software development can be impeded by what has been described as Technical Debt (TD). The aim of this study is to explore the ...

research-article
A framework for managing interest in technical debt: an industrial validation

Technical debt management entails the quantification of principal and interest. In our previous work we had introduced a framework for calculating the Technical Debt Breaking Point (TD-BP), which is a point in time where the accumulated interest becomes ...

research-article
Limiting technical debt with maintainability assurance: an industry survey on used techniques and differences with service- and microservice-based systems

Maintainability assurance techniques are used to control this quality attribute and limit the accumulation of potentially unknown technical debt. Since the industry state of practice and especially the handling of Service- and Microservice-Based Systems ...

SESSION: Future research (short papers)
short-paper
Technical debt-related information asymmetry between finance and IT

This position paper proposes a new stream of research targeted at technical debt as a source of information asymmetry between finance and IT professionals involved in information technology investment decisions. Finance teams interact with technology ...

short-paper
Public Access
A position study to investigate technical debt associated with security weaknesses

Context: Managing technical debt (TD) associated with potential security breaches found during design can lead to catching vulnerabilities (i.e., exploitable weaknesses) earlier in the software lifecycle; thus, anticipating TD principal and interest ...

Contributors
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Siemens AG
  • The University of British Columbia
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Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 14 of 31 submissions, 45%
YearSubmittedAcceptedRate
TechDebt '20311445%
Overall311445%