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Towards a Technical Debt Management Framework based on Cost-Benefit Analysis

Authors:
Muhammad Firdaus Bin Harun
Horst Lichter

Keywords: technical debt management; code smells; architecture smells; refactoring; cost-benefit analysis

Abstract:
Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor of bad software design or immature artifacts of a software system. The metaphor has been quite intensively researched especially on how to identify the TD symptoms, (e.g., system deficiencies or architecture violations) explicitly. Although the TD identification is quite important in the TD management process, a systematic management of TD and how to reduce it should also be considered important in each release of the development project. Otherwise, the software becomes more and more unmaintainable. In this paper, we introduce a framework to manage and reduce the TD of software systems. As it is based on quantification and a cost-benefit analysis, it is called Cost-Benefit based Technical Debt Management (CoBeTDM). CoBeTDM defines explicit phases focusing on the most important aspects of TD management: identification, monitoring, and prioritization. Overall, CoBeTDM should support managers to take the right decisions regarding the software evolution and the reduction of the collected TD at the right time.

Pages: 70 to 73

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: November 15, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-438-1

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from November 15, 2015 to November 20, 2015