Technical Debt

How Software Organizations Can Stay Solvent

Paris Avgeriou

University of Groningen, The Netherlands

paris@cs.rug.nl

Abstract: The term Technical Debt has become rather popular over the past years, expressing technical compromises

that can yield short-term benefits but may hurt the long-term health of a software system. There are good

news: Technical Debt as a metaphor resonates well with technical and non-technical stakeholders, and can

potentially act as a bridge between them and facilitate communication and negotiation. There are also bad

news: Technical Debt is undeniably accumulating in most large systems, pervading the entire lifecycle from

requirements to deployment; it threatens to “bankrupt” those systems if it is not actively managed. The future

of software engineering research and practice will revolve around how to identify, measure, prioritize and

repay Technical Debt, as well as how to make sound investments to balance short- and long- term goals. In

this talk, we revisit the state-of-the art and practice to examine how much progress is achieved so far, and we

discuss some promising future directions in the field, concluding with a “call to arms”.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Paris Avgeriou is Professor of Software

Engineering in the University of Groningen, the

Netherlands where he has led the Software

Engineering research group since September 2006.

Before joining Groningen, he was a post-doctoral

Fellow of the European Research Consortium for

Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). He sits on

the editorial board of IEEE Software and Springer

Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming.

His research interests lie in the area of software

architecture, with strong emphasis on architecture

modeling, knowledge, evolution, patterns and link to

requirements. He champions the evidence-based

paradigm in Software Engineering research.

Avgeriou P.

Technical Debt - How Software Organizations Can Stay Solvent.

DOI: 10.5220/0006221400030004

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2016), pages 3-4

ISBN: 978-989-758-190-8