Title
Exploring the costs of technical debt management – a case study
Abstract
Technical debt is a metaphor for delayed software maintenance tasks. Incurring technical debt may bring short-term benefits to a project, but such benefits are often achieved at the cost of extra work in future, analogous to paying interest on the debt. Currently technical debt is managed implicitly, if at all. However, on large systems, it is too easy to lose track of delayed tasks or to misunderstand their impact. Therefore, we have proposed a new approach to managing technical debt, which we believe to be helpful for software managers to make informed decisions. In this study we explored the costs of the new approach by tracking the technical debt management activities in an on-going software project. The results from the study provided insights into the impact of technical debt management on software projects. In particular, we found that there is a significant start-up cost when beginning to track and monitor technical debt, but the cost of ongoing management soon declines to very reasonable levels.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/s10664-014-9351-7
Empirical Software Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Technical debt,Decision making,Cost,Case study
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1382-3256
25
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.06
19
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yuepu Guo146622.63
Rodrigo Oliveira Spínola2927.70
Carolyn Seaman31628110.06