Continuous practices and technical debt: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Technical debt in software development is a common problem that is overlooked by many development teams. This debt can be generated from a variety of reasons, including time pressure and complexity in software. Technical debt in simple terms is when a simple and less optimized solution is carried out in order to gain short term benefits, which leads to refactoring and reworking code later on, costing both time and money. The issue is present in both big, established companies and small startups, and is the reason why many of these small startups never get enough economic grip before debt catch up and they go bankrupt. This paper aims to address this problem by exploring how continuous practices including DevOps could help resolve this issue by adopting the right approaches into the software development cycle and workflow. So as to collect information about these topics, a systematic literature review has been conducted, covering both positive and negative impacts these practices can have on technical debt. The findings will present the current practices used to manage and reduce the accumulation of technical debt, if and how these approaches can be used to reduce already existing technical debt and which of these practices that have the biggest impact on technical debt. The paper concludes that there's potential for continuous practices including DevOps to possibly reduce technical debt if applied appropriately