Paper Info
Title
The Danger of Architectural Technical Debt: Contagious Debt and Vicious Circles
Abstract
A known problem in large software companies is to balance the prioritization of short-term with long-term viability. Specifically, architecture violations (Architecture Technical Debt) taken to deliver fast might hinder future feature development. However, some technical debt requires more interest to be paid than other. We have investigated which Technical Debt items generate more effort and how this effort is manifested during software development. We conducted a multiple-case embedded case study comprehending 7 sites at 5 large international software companies. We found that some Technical Debt items are contagious, causing other parts of the system to be contaminated with the same problem, which may lead to non-linear growth of interest. We also identify another socio-technical phenomenon, for which a combination of weak awareness of debt, time pressure and refactoring creates Vicious Circles of events during the development. Such phenomena need to be identified and stopped before the development is led to a crisis point. Finally, this paper presents a taxonomy of the most dangerous items identified during the qualitative investigation and a model of their effects that can be used for prioritization, for further investigation and as a quality model for extracting more precise and context-specific metrics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/WICSA.2015.31
Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
architectural technical debt, agile software development, effort, socio-technical phenomena, multiple case-study, qualitative model
Architecture,Systems engineering,Computer science,Debt,Agile software development,Technical debt,Phenomenon,Code refactoring,Software development,Information and Computer Science
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
22
0.85
13
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Antonio Martini1805.09
Jan Bosch280788.13