Terese Besker

Terese Besker, Antonio Martini, Jan Bosch

When developing software, it is vitally important to keep the level of technical debt down since it is well established from several studies that technical debt can, e.g., lower the development productivity, decrease the developers' morale, and compromise the overall quality of the software. However, even if researchers and practitioners working in today's software development industry are quite familiar with the concept of technical debt and its related negative consequences, there has been no empirical research focusing specifically on how software managers actively communicate and manage the need to keep the level of technical debt as low as possible.

Jesper Olsson, Erik Risfelt, Terese Besker et al.

Software engineering is a human activity. Despite this, human aspects are under-represented in technical debt research, perhaps because they are challenging to evaluate. This study's objective was to investigate the relationship between technical debt and affective states (feelings, emotions, and moods) from software practitioners. Forty participants (N = 40) from twelve companies took part in a mixed-methods approach, consisting of a repeated-measures (r = 5) experiment (n = 200), a survey, and semi-structured interviews. The statistical analysis shows that different design smells (strong indicators of technical debt) negatively or positively impact affective states. From the qualitative data, it is clear that technical debt activates a substantial portion of the emotional spectrum and is psychologically taxing. Further, the practitioners' reactions to technical debt appear to fall in different levels of maturity. We argue that human aspects in technical debt are important factors to consider, as they may result in, e.g., procrastination, apprehension, and burnout.

Valentina Lenarduzzi, Terese Besker, Davide Taibi et al.

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations.