A formal approach to technical debt decision making

Abstract

The notion of technical debt attracts significant attention, especially in the context of reconciling architecture and agile development. However, most work on technical debt is still largely informal and if it provides a formalization it is often ad-hoc. In this paper, we provide a detailed, formal analysis of decision making on technical debt in development.Using this formalization, we show that optimal decision making is not effectively computable in real-world situations and provide several well-defined approximations that allow to handle the problem nevertheless in practical situations. Combining these approximations in a single method leads to a light-weight approach that can be effectively applied in iterative software development, including agile approaches.

Exploring the costs of technical debt management – a case study

“…By contrast, some other approaches for technical debt decision making take a more formal approach. For example, Schmid proposed an approach to formalize the technical debt concept and decision making (Schmid 2013). In this approach, technical debt is modeled using implementation cost, rework cost and future evolution path.…”

“…Section 2 outlined some approaches to technical debt decision making in the literature (Bachmann et al 2012;Nord et al 2012;Schmid 2013), none of which have been validated in practice. In section 3.3, we propose a simple approach based on risk management techniques, which we adapt in the case study.…”

“…Decisions are largely based on a manager's experience, or even gut feeling, rather than hard data gathered through proper measurement. While some approaches do rely on software measurement data (Gaudin 2009, Schmid 2013, there is a shortage of evidence that the attributes being measured have a causal effect on maintenance outcomes like quality and productivity. Thus, decisions based on traditional software metrics (size, complexity, etc.…”

Supporting Technical Debt Cataloging with TD-Tracker Tool

“…For this planning, the project manager sorts TD according to their cost and benefit and determines the set that should be paid to minimize the cost and maximize the benefits of the project. Various approaches [8,32,33] have been proposed for technical debt prioritization and decision making.…”

“…It is possible to find several works related to decision making process in TD, such as [30,32,33]. TDTracker tool aims to help managers control TD and support their decision, establishing a relationship to these works.…”