research-article

Managing technical debt in software-reliant systems

Authors:

Philippe Kruchten,

Alan MacCormack,

Raghvinder Sangwan,

Carolyn Seaman,

Kevin Sullivan,

Nico ZazworkaAuthors Info & Claims

FoSER '10: Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research

Pages 47 - 52

https://doi.org/10.1145/1882362.1882373

Published: 07 November 2010 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

Kanita N(2024)Modèles explicatifs de la production de la dette technique dans les contextes Agile et DevOps : une revue de la littérature basée sur la méthode BIBGTSystèmes d'information & management10.3917/sim.234.0007Volume 28:4(7-41)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3917/sim.234.0007
Fungprasertkul SBahsoon RKazman R(2024)Technical Debt Monitoring Decision Making with Skin in the GameACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/366480533:7(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3664805
Riquet NDevroey XVanderose BCodabux ZGalster MSpinola R(2024)Debt Stories: Capturing Social and Technical Debt in the IndustryProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3644384.3644473(40-44)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3644384.3644473
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Index Terms

Managing technical debt in software-reliant systems
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

FoSER '10: Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research

November 2010

460 pages

ISBN:9781450304276

DOI:10.1145/1882362

General Chair:
Gruia-Catalin Roman
Washington University in St. Louis, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kevin Sullivan
University of Virginia, USA

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 07 November 2010

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SIGSOFT/FSE'10: 18th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 7 - 8, 2010

New Mexico, Santa Fe, USA

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Cited By

Kanita N(2024)Modèles explicatifs de la production de la dette technique dans les contextes Agile et DevOps : une revue de la littérature basée sur la méthode BIBGTSystèmes d'information & management10.3917/sim.234.0007Volume 28:4(7-41)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3917/sim.234.0007
Fungprasertkul SBahsoon RKazman R(2024)Technical Debt Monitoring Decision Making with Skin in the GameACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/366480533:7(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3664805
Riquet NDevroey XVanderose BCodabux ZGalster MSpinola R(2024)Debt Stories: Capturing Social and Technical Debt in the IndustryProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3644384.3644473(40-44)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3644384.3644473
OBrien DBiswas SImtiaz SAbdalkareem RShihab ERajan HRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Are Prompt Engineering and TODO Comments Friends or Foes? An Evaluation on GitHub CopilotProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639176(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639176
Ma YLuo SShang YZhang YLi Z(2024)Enhancing source code classification effectiveness via prompt learning incorporating knowledge featuresScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-69402-714:1Online publication date: 30-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-69402-7
Levén WBroman HBesker TTorkar R(2024)The broken windows theory applies to technical debtEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10456-629:4Online publication date: 24-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10456-6
Siavvas MTsoukalas DMarantos CPapadopoulos LLamprakos CMatei OStrydis CSiddiqi MChrobocinski PFilus KDomańska JAvgeriou PAmpatzoglou ASoudris DChatzigeorgiou AGelenbe EKehagias DTzovaras D(2024)SDK4ED: a platform for building energy efficient, dependable, and maintainable embedded softwareAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-024-00450-z31:2Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
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Slupczynski AAlexander PLichter H(2024)Defining and Evaluating Prudence and Recklessness of Enterprise Architecture DebtEnterprise Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-64755-0_12(237-261)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64755-0_12
Sousa ARocha LBritto R(2023)Architectural Technical Debt - A Systematic Mapping StudyProceedings of the XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3613372.3613399(196-205)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613372.3613399
Candido De Melo AAccioly NFagundes RSantos W(2023)Identifying and Measuring Technical Debt in Software Requirements: a supporting guideProceedings of the XIX Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems10.1145/3592813.3592925(356-363)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3592813.3592925
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