Technical Debt interest assessment: from issues to project

Antonio Martini, Simon Vajda, Rajesh Vasa, Allan Jones, Mohamed Abdelrazek, John Grundy, Jan Bosch

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference PaperResearchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The interest of Technical Debt (TD) is difcult to calculate, especially on a project level. Current approaches are based on fne-grain issue assessment, but there is no evidence about how TD is assessed on a project level. A few tools use an aggregation function that sum the TD issues on a project level. We conducted a multiple case-study on four diferent projects. We asked the project teams to assess the TD both on an issue level and on a project level. We also asked the product manager and a senior developer to assess the TD on a project level. We found that the function mapping the interest of TD to a project overall is not the sum of issue-level TD. We report the quantitative results of the performed experiment and we also developed a qualitative explanation of the results based on interviews with the development team. This paper represents a frst step towards assessing the interest of TD at a project level.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the XP2017 Scientific Workshops
EditorsFrancesca Arcelli Fontana, Clemente Izurieta, Robert L. Nord, Wolfgang Trumler
Place of PublicationNew York NY USA
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Number of pages6
VolumePart F129907
ISBN (Electronic)9781450352642
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Externally publishedYes
EventInternational Workshop on Managing Technical Debt 2017 - Cologne, Germany
Duration: 22 May 201722 May 2017
Conference number: 9th

Workshop

WorkshopInternational Workshop on Managing Technical Debt 2017
Abbreviated titleMTD 2017
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityCologne
Period22/05/1722/05/17

Keywords

  • Case study
  • Interest
  • Project management
  • Technical debt
  • Tracking

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