Experiences with technical debt and management strategies in production systems engineering

Abstract

Technical Debt (TD) has proven to be a suitable communication concept for software-intensive contexts to raise awareness regarding longterm negative effects of deviations from standards and guidelines. TD has also been introduced to systems engineering domain, to communicate design shortcomings in long-running, software-assisted systems. We analysed potential TD in the engineering data exchange for production system engineering. Similar to requirements engineering in software-intensive systems, data exchange in the design phase plays an integral part in Software Engineering (SE) for Production Systems Engineering: Specifications, and physical logic have to be derived from heterogeneous plant models or parameter tables designed by different stakeholders. However, traditional procedures and inadequate tool support lead to inefficient data extraction and integration. We identified debt arising from knowledge representation, data model and the exchange process. The refinement validation of identified TD was achieved through semi-structured interviews with representatives in two analysed companies. In an online survey with ten participants from an industrial consortium we evaluated whether the identified TD concepts also applied to other companies, which is true for the majority of TD. Furthermore, we discuss promising TD management strategies to repay and manage negative effects and the accumulation of additional debt, such as improved communication, test-driven model engineering and visualisation of engineering models.