Identifying Technical Debt Impact on Maintenance Effort- An Industrial Case Study

摘要

Technical Debt refers to sub-optimal solutions in software development that affect the lifecycle properties of a system. Source Code Technical Debt is considered to be a problem formany software projects, as neglecting Technical Debt on actively developed software willincrease the required effort to maintain the software as well as to extend it with new features.However, refactoring Technical Debt also requires effort which is why it must be investigatedif the Technical Debt is worth resolving. To be able to make such decisions, the existingTechnical Debt must be correctly identified and presented in an understandable way. Thisthesis addresses the problem by conducting a case study at Ericsson, where Technical Debt ina large industrial C/C++ project has been investigated. The investigation was done bydesigning a measurement system based on ISO standard 15939:2007 and reviewingTechnical Debt measurement tools suitable for its construction. The investigation alsoincluded correlating the resulting Technical Debt measurements with maintenance effort byapplying triangulation of several methods. This allowed the Technical Debt types to beprioritized based on their correlation strength. The chosen Technical Debt measures arepresented as a unified indicator that indicates file refactoring priority in order to supportdecision-making regarding Technical Debt Management, so that additional maintenanceeffort can be avoided in the future.