How do software development teams manage technical debt? – An empirical study

Jesse Yli-Huumo,Andrey Maglyas,Kari Smolander

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2016.05.018

Jesse Yli-Huumo, Andrey Maglyas + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2016.05.018

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Abstract

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor for taking shortcuts or workarounds in technical decisions to gain short-term benefit in time-to-market and earlier software release. In this study, one large software development organization is investigated to gather empirical evidence related to the concept of technical debt management (TDM). We used the exploratory case study method to collect and analyze empirical data in the case organization by interviewing a total of 25 persons in eight software development teams. We were able to identify teams where the current strategy for TDM was only to fix TD when necessary, when it started to cause too much trouble for development. We also identified teams where the management had a systematic strategy to identify, measure and monitor TD during the development process. It seems that TDM can be associated with a similar maturity concept as software development in general. Development teams may raise their maturity by increasing their awareness and applying more advanced processes, techniques and tools in TDM. TDM is an essential part of sustainable software development, and companies have to find right approaches to deal with TD to produce healthy software that can be developed and maintained in the future.

Highlights

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor used to describe a situation in software development, where a shortcut or workaround is used in a technical decision (Kruchten et al, 2012b)
In order to understand Technical debt management (TDM) in a real-life software development environment, we studied eight software development teams in a large organization that is a provider of multiple software solutions
“We have quite often security reviews, and maybe some technical debt can come from security” “We can measure how much time we spend on this slice of the backlog

Summary

Introduction

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor used to describe a situation in software development, where a shortcut or workaround is used in a technical decision (Kruchten et al, 2012b). A shortcut or workaround can give the company a benefit in the short term with quicker release to the customer and an advantage in time-to-market over the competition (Kruchten et al, 2012a; Yli-Huumo et al, 2015a). If these shortcuts and workarounds are not repaid, TD can accumulate and hurt the overall quality of the software and the productivity of the development team in the long term (Zazworka et al, 2011b). Even though the metaphor was first introduced over twenty years ago, a recent mapping study shows that it has received the attention of researchers and practitioners only in the past few years (Li et al, 2015a )

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