Trade-off decisions across time in technical debt management

Christoph Becker, Ruzanna Chitchyan, Stefanie Betz, Curtis McCord
2018 Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt - TechDebt '18  
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more » ... te to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. How to cite TSpace items Always cite the published version, so the author(s) will receive recognition through services that track citation counts, e.g. Scopus. If you need to cite the page number of the author manuscript from TSpace because you cannot access the published version, then cite the TSpace version in addition to the published version using the permanent URI (handle) found on the record page. ABSTRACT Technical Debt arises from decisions that favour short-term outcomes at the cost of longer-term disadvantages. They may be taken knowingly or based on missing or incomplete awareness of the costs; they are taken in different roles, situations, stages and ways. Whatever technical or business factor motivate such decisions, they always imply a trade-off in time, a 'now vs. later'. How exactly are such decisions made, and how have they been studied? This paper analyzes how decisions on technical debt are studied in software engineering via a systematic literature review. It examines the presently published Software Engineering research on Technical Debt, with a particular focus on decisions involving time. The findings reveal surprising gaps in published work on empirical research in decision making. We observe that research has rarely studied how decisions are made, even in papers that focus on the decision process. Instead, most attention is focused on engineering measures and feeding them into an idealized decision making process. These findings lead to a set of recommendations for future empirical research on Technical Debt.
doi:10.1145/3194164.3194171 dblp:conf/icse/BeckerCBM18 fatcat:vd7m53ynhfdkxhs3u6eui5krqe