Increasing Awareness for Potential Technical Debt in the Engineering of Production Systems

Abstract

Engineers from the production systems domain have to cope with various challenges. These include interdisciplinarity, an ever increasing complexity, and time pressure. Due to these factors, engineers oftentimes choose suboptimal solutions, thus causing so-called Technical Debt (TD). No matter whether this TD is taken consciously or unconsciously, engineers need to become aware of their decisions’ potential repercussions as early as possible. This paper presents a conceptual framework that helps engineers to identify conformance violations and inconsistencies based on formal knowledge bases. This increases awareness for potential TD. We hereby emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary inconsistencies, which are especially hard to keep track of. The framework also aims to assess the criticality of TD and thus supports decision making in the engineering of production systems.