Technical Debt Metaphor Research Articles

Debt-Prone Bugs: Technical Debt in Software Maintenance

Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule, which is known as the technical debt metaphor. In this article, we propose the concept of debt-prone bugs to model the technical debt in software maintenance. We identify three types of debt-prone bugs, namely tag bugs, reopened bugs, and duplicate bugs. A case study on Mozilla is conducted to examine the impact of debt-prone bugs in software products. We investigate the correlation between debt-prone bugs and the product quality. For a product under development, we build prediction models based on historical products to predict the time cost of fixing bugs. The result shows that identifying debt-prone bugs can assist in monitoring and improving software quality.

Technical debt in software development

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community as a way to understand and communicate issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost. This is a report on a third workshop on managing technical debt, which took place as part of the 34rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012). The goal of this third workshop was to discuss managing technical debt as a part of the research agenda for the software engineering field, in particular focusing on eliciting and visualizing debt, and creating payback strategies.

Managing technical debt in software development

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community as a way to understand and communicate about issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost. This is a report on a second workshop on managing technical debt, which took place as part of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011). The goal of this second workshop was to discuss the management of technical debt: to assess current practice in industry and to further refine a research agenda for software engineering in this area.

Perfectionists in a World of Finite Resources

The metaphor of technical debt, originally coined by Ward Cunninghamhas helped me recently get a handle on this type of issue. Almost invariably in software projects, developers can be so focused on accomplishing the needed functionality that the software itself grows less understandable, more complex, and harder to modify. Since this system deterioration usually reflects a lack of activity spent in refactoring, documentation, and other aspects of the project infrastructure, we can view it as a kind of debt that developers owe the system. Ward Cunningham's metaphor helps make clear an important trade-off: although a little debt can speed up software development in the short run, this benefit is achieved at the cost of extra work in the future, as if paying interest on the debt. Technical debt gives us a frame work for thinking about the fact that not doing some good things today, no matter how valuable they seem on their own merits, allows us to invest in other good things. In short, there are always trade-offs in life.