Technical Debt

General Introduction

Technical debt, which refers to immature software artifacts that fail to meet the required level of quality, has recently been attracted increasing attention from both academic and industry in software engineering field. To date, little work has been done on technical debt at architecture level, i.e., architectural debt. In the short term, architectural debt may be incurred to fulfill specific business advantages; and, in the long term, architectural debt can to a great extent reduce the maintainability and evolvability of a software system. Our group focuses on architectural debt management which main goal is to achieve the balance between value and cost of architectural debt. Until now, we have proposed a conceptual model of architectural debt and an architectural technical debt management process applying this ATD conceptual model in order to facilitate the decision-making in a value-oriented perspective of architecting. Our current work is focusing on identifying, measuring, and documenting architectural debt.

Research Projects

• STAND (Semantic-enabled collaboration Towards Analysis, Negotiation and Documentation on distributed requirements engineering)
  Grant: AFR
  Period: 2010-2014
• SDK4ED (Software Development ToolKit for Energy Optimization and Technical Debt Elimination)
  Grant: H2020 - N. 780572
  Period: 2018-2021

Tools and Demos

For tools and demos regarding this research area, please visit our Resources page.

Recent Publications

(For more publications go to the publications page for Technical Debt.)