research-article

Technical debt cripples software developer productivity: a longitudinal study on developers' daily software development work

Authors:

Antonio Martini,

Jan BoschAuthors Info & Claims

TechDebt '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt

Pages 105 - 114

https://doi.org/10.1145/3194164.3194178

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Software companies need to continuously deliver customer value, both from a short- and long-term perspective. However, software development can be impeded by what has been described as Technical Debt (TD). The aim of this study is to explore the negative consequences of TD in terms of wasted software development time. This study also investigates on which additional activities this wasted time is spent and whether different types of TD impact the wasted time differently. This study also sets out to examine the benefits of tracking and communicating the amount of wasted time, both from a developer's and manager's perspective. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study, surveying 43 software developers, together with follow-up interviews with 16 industrial software practitioners. The analysis of the reported wasted time revealed that developers waste, on average, 23% of their development time due to TD and that they are frequently forced to introduce new TD due to already existing TD. The most common activity on which additional time is spent is performing additional testing.

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Gnoyke PSchulze SKrüger J(2023)On Developing and Improving Tools for Architecture-Smell Tracking in Java Systems2023 IEEE 23rd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00034(248-253)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
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Avgeriou POzkaya IChatzigeorgiou ACiolkowski MErnst NKoontz RPoort EShull F(2023)Technical Debt Management: The Road Ahead for Successful Software Delivery2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Future of Software Engineering (ICSE-FoSE)10.1109/ICSE-FoSE59343.2023.00007(15-30)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
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Index Terms

Technical debt cripples software developer productivity: a longitudinal study on developers' daily software development work
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management

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Abstract
Software companies need to deliver customer value continuously, both from a short- and long-term perspective. However, software development can be impeded by technical debt (TD). Although significant theoretical work has been ...
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

TechDebt '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt

May 2018

157 pages

ISBN:9781450357135

DOI:10.1145/3194164

General Chair:
Robert L. Nord
Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh
,
Program Chairs:
Frank Buschmann
Siemens, München, Germany
,
Philippe Kruchten
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 May 2018

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ICSE '18

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SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS

ICSE '18: 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 27 - 28, 2018

Gothenburg, Sweden

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Overall Acceptance Rate 14 of 31 submissions, 45%

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Cited By

Gnoyke PSchulze SKrüger J(2024)Evolution patterns of software-architecture smells: An empirical study of intra- and inter-version smellsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112170217(112170)Online publication date: Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112170
Gnoyke PSchulze SKrüger J(2023)On Developing and Improving Tools for Architecture-Smell Tracking in Java Systems2023 IEEE 23rd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00034(248-253)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00034
Avgeriou POzkaya IChatzigeorgiou ACiolkowski MErnst NKoontz RPoort EShull F(2023)Technical Debt Management: The Road Ahead for Successful Software Delivery2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Future of Software Engineering (ICSE-FoSE)10.1109/ICSE-FoSE59343.2023.00007(15-30)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-FoSE59343.2023.00007
Ibrahim SSallehudin HYahaya J(2023)Exploring Software Development Waste and Lean Approach in Green Perspective2023 International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Informatics (ICEEI)10.1109/ICEEI59426.2023.10346869(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEEI59426.2023.10346869
Rachow PWiese Mvan Hoorn A(2023)Taxonomy of Architecture Maintainability Smells2023 30th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC60848.2023.00013(31-40)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC60848.2023.00013
Bi FVogel-Heuser BHuang ZOcker F(2023)Characteristics, causes, and consequences of technical debt in the automation domainJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111725204:COnline publication date: 1-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111725
Wiese MBorowa K(2023)IT managers’ perspective on Technical Debt ManagementJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111700202:COnline publication date: 1-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111700
Abdelfattah ARodriguez AWalker ACerny T(2023)Detecting Semantic Clones in Microservices Using ComponentsSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-023-01910-14:5Online publication date: 23-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-023-01910-1
Molnar AMotogna S(2023)An Exploration of Technical Debt over the Lifetime of Open-Source SoftwareEvaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-36597-3_14(292-314)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36597-3_14
Szabados KFarkas IKovács A(2022)Reproducibility in the technical debt domainActa Universitatis Sapientiae, Informatica10.2478/ausi-2021-001613:2(335-360)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2022
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