Technical debt is a well understood and used concept in IT development. The metaphor, rooted in the financial world, captures the amount of work that development teams owe to a product. Every time developers take a shortcut within development, the technical debt accumulates. Technical debt identification can be accomplished via manual reporting on the technical debt items, which is called self-admitted technical debt. Several specialised methods and tools have also emerged that promise to measure the technical debt. Based on experience in the community, the impression emerged that the measured technical debt is of a significantly different amount than the self-admitted debt. In this context, we decided to perform empirical research on the possible gap between the two. We investigated 14 production-grade software products while determining the amount of accumulated technical debt via (a) a self-admitting procedure and (b) measuring the debt. The outcomes show clearly the significant difference in the technical debt reported by the two methods. We urge development and quality-assurance teams not to rely on technical debt measurement alone. The tools demonstrated their strength in identifying low-level code technical debt items that violate a set of predefined rules. However, developers should have additional insight into violations, based on the interconnected source code and its relation to the domain and higher-level design decisions.

Mikrostoritvena arhitektura je preizkušen, in kot kažejo podatki, tudi vodilen arhitekturni stil informacijskih rešitev zadnjega desetletja. Kot je praksa na vseh inženirskih področjih, tudi pri vpeljavi mikrostoritvene arhitekture uporabljamo preizkušene dobre prakse. Načrtovalski vzorci ne predstavljajo konkretne implementacije, temveč praktično preizkušene ideje, kako rešiti določeno skupino izzivov. Vzorce lahko umestimo v kategorije ali skupine - vsaka izmed njih naslavlja določeno problematiko s katero se soočajo razvojne skupine. Brezstrežniško računalništvo z vedno hitrejšim razvojem oblačnega računalništva vedno bolj pridobiva na pomenu. Arhitekture brez strežnika predvidevajo zasnovo informacijskih rešitev, ki vključuje zaledje kot storitev (angl. Backend as a Service - BaaS) in kodo po meri (angl. Functions as a Service -FaaS), ki se izvaja v upravljanih, kratkotrajnih vsebnikih na izbrani platformi.

The software product lines (SPL) enable development teams to fully address a systematic reuse of a shared assets to deliver a family of a similar software products. Mobile applications are an obvious and proven candidate for employing an SPL approach. Technically speaking, the SPL implementation varies. In addition to the industry-accepted best practices, including build-time directives, advanced design patterns employment, custom builds etc., the microservice architectural style (MSA) can also be used in terms of realizing SPL. Our empirical data demonstrate the impact of a SPL approach in multiple edition mobile application development. The next step in our research is to verify what the impact of the SPL implementation with MSA in the mobile application area is. Our hypothesis is, that in addition to delivering high-quality features rapidly, the positive impact on the accumulated technical debt will be demonstrated as a direct result of employing MSA to mobile development.