Managing Technical Debt in Software-Intensive Systems

Title	Managing Technical Debt in Software-Intensive Systems
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2010
Authors	Brown, N., Y. Cai, Y. Guo, R. Kazman, M. Kim, P. Kruchten, E. Lim, A. MacCormack, R. Nord, I. Ozkaya, R. Sangwan, C. B. Seaman, K. Sullivan, and N. Zazworka
Conference Name	Future of Software Engineering Research (FoSER 2010), part of FSE 2010
Publisher	ACM
Conference Location	Santa Fe, NM, USA
Abstract	Delivering increasingly complex software-reliant systems demands better ways to manage the long-term effects of short- term expedients. The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the agile development community as a way to understand and communicate such issues. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (e.g., modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (e.g., a deadline), and that such compromises incur a “debt”: on which “interest” has to be paid and which the “principal” should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project. We argue that the software engineering research community has an opportunity to study and improve this concept. We can offer software engineers a foundation for managing such trade-offs based on models of their economic impacts. Therefore, we propose managing technical debt as a part of the future research agenda for the software engineering field.
URL	https://files.me.com/philippe.kruchten/rka8lk
Refereed Designation	Refereed

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