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World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies

WorldCIST 2021: Trends and Applications in Information Systems and Technologies pp 425–434Cite as

Monitoring and Prevention: How Technical Debt is Managed by Software Practitioners

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Part of the Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing book series (AISC,volume 1367)

Abstract

Technical Debt is a concept to describe the gap between current solutions and optimal solutions, which could hurt system quality. The presence of technical debt is inevitable, becoming more realistic to deal with it than try to avoid it. Therefore, it is relevant to understand how software development teams are dealing with technical debt. This study aims to characterize the practices used to monitor and prevent technical debt by software practitioners. A corpus of responses from a survey of 226 software practitioners from Chile and Colombia is used to collect and analyze these practices. Results were mostly based on the point of view of developers (87; 38.5%), project managers (49; 21.7%), and software architects (48; 21.2%) and showed that weekly/daily team meetings was the most cited practice to monitor TD items. Adoption of good practices and well-defined architecture were selected as the best practices to avoid the presence of TD in software projects.

Keywords

  • Technical debt monitoring
  • Technical debt prevention
  • Insightd
  • Software practitioners

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

    Boris Pérez, Camilo Castellanos & Darío Correal

  2. Universidad Francisco de Paula Stder, Cúcuta, Colombia

    Boris Pérez

Authors
  1. Boris Pérez
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  2. Camilo Castellanos
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  3. Darío Correal
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Boris Pérez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ISEG, University of Lisbon, LISBOA, Portugal

    Prof. Álvaro Rocha

  2. College of Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Hojjat Adeli

  3. Institute of Data Science and Digital Te, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Dr. Gintautas Dzemyda

  4. DCT, Universidade Portucalense, Porto, Portugal

    Prof. Fernando Moreira

  5. Department of Information Sciences, University of Sheffield, Lisboa, Portugal

    Prof. Ana Maria Ramalho Correia

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Pérez, B., Castellanos, C., Correal, D. (2021). Monitoring and Prevention: How Technical Debt is Managed by Software Practitioners. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Dzemyda, G., Moreira, F., Ramalho Correia, A.M. (eds) Trends and Applications in Information Systems and Technologies . WorldCIST 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1367. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72660-7_41

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