Technical debt interest assessment: from issues to project

ABSTRACT

The interest of Technical Debt (TD) is difficult to calculate, especially on a project level. Current approaches are based on fine-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 different 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 first step towards assessing the interest of TD at a project level.

References

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software development process management

      • Risk management