Abstract
Technical Debt is a term coined by Ward Cunningham to denote the amount of rework required to put a piece of software into that state which it should have had from the beginning. The term outdates the agile revolution. Technical debt can occur using any development approach, but since agile development has become wide spread the notion of “technical debt” has gained much more attention. That is because if agile development is not done properly, technical debt accrues very fast and threatens to strangle the project. In this paper the author describes how technical debt comes to being, how it can be measured and what can be done to prevent it in agile development. The emphasis of the paper is on how to prevent it. What measures are necessary in an agile development project to keep technical debt from accruing over time? The paper lists out a number of measures which can be taken – organizational, procedural and technical. Automated tools play an important role in the struggle against technical debt. Samples are given how a tool can be helpful in identifying and removing problems before they get out of hand. Also important is an external auditing agency which monitors projects in progress with the aide of automated tools. In the end a case study is presented which illustrates the monitoring of technical debt within an agile development and what counter measures are required to stop it.
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Sneed, H.M. (2014). Dealing with Technical Debt in Agile Development Projects. In: Winkler, D., Biffl, S., Bergsmann, J. (eds) Software Quality. Model-Based Approaches for Advanced Software and Systems Engineering. SWQD 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 166. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03602-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03602-1_4
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