A Taxonomy of Assets for the Development of Software-Intensive Products and Services

Abstract

Context: Developing software-intensive products or services involves utilising many artefacts that are either part of the offering or part of enabling their development. These artefacts, if valuable and used more than once by the development organisation, can be seen as assets such as test cases, code, requirements, and documentation. As such, assets are often reused, updated, and become a base or even necessity for product development and evolution over time, constituting an investment. Assets are not well understood beyond code-based ones in the area of technical debt. Thus most asset types are often overlooked, and their state, which is subject to degradation over time, has not been much studied. Method: To address the problem, we conducted industrial focus groups with five companies and a literature review. The results were analysed qualitatively and summarised in a taxonomy. Results: We created a structured, extendable taxonomy of assets. The taxonomy contains 57 assets. Conclusions: The taxonomy serves as foundations for defining and identifying assets as a concept. It provides the foundation for studies into asset degradation and subsequent asset management. The taxonomy also includes code-based assets and thus can be helpful in further research into investigating degradation and debt concepts.