TY - GEN
T1 - Managing technical debt in software-reliant systems
AU - Brown, Nanette
AU - Cai, Yuanfang
AU - Guo, Yuepu
AU - Kazman, Rick
AU - Kim, Miryung
AU - Kruchten, Philippe
AU - Lim, Erin
AU - MacCormack, Alan
AU - Nord, Robert
AU - Ozkaya, Ipek
AU - Sangwan, Raghvinder
AU - Seaman, Carolyn
AU - Sullivan, Kevin
AU - Zazworka, Nico
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Delivering increasingly complex software-reliant systems demands better ways to manage the long-term effects of shortterm 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.
AB - Delivering increasingly complex software-reliant systems demands better ways to manage the long-term effects of shortterm 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79951604076&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79951604076&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1882362.1882373
DO - 10.1145/1882362.1882373
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:79951604076
SN - 9781450304276
T3 - Proceedings of the FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research, FoSER 2010
SP - 47
EP - 51
BT - Proceedings of the FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research, FoSER 2010
T2 - FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research, FoSER 2010
Y2 - 7 November 2010 through 11 November 2010
ER -