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Debt Stories: Capturing Social and Technical Debt in the Industry

Published: 07 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

In today's organizations, software is mission-critical. However, the legacy of past decisions can make tasks related to artifacts increasingly inefficient or risky, creating debt. While most researchers and practitioners mainly focus on technical debt, some have investigated its social dimensions, known as social debt. We argue that organizations developing software need to tackle debt holistically, as it is intrinsically a socio-technical issue. In this short paper, we rely on a definition of socio-technical debt based on the existing literature to define Debt Stories: a tool based on the User Story format, that can help capture debt elements directly from the stakeholders involved in software development. A debt story includes information about the role of the stakeholder in the development process, the social or technical context, and the impact of the debt element on the different tasks performed by the stakeholder. We provide a first empirical evaluation of the usage of Debt Stories in an industrial context, demonstrating the relevance of Debt Stories to express and communicate socio-technical debt.

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cover image ACM Conferences
TechDebt '24: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt
April 2024
55 pages
ISBN:9798400705908
DOI:10.1145/3644384
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 the author(s) 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].

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Published: 07 June 2024

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  1. socio-technical debt
  2. debt stories
  3. empirical software engineering

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