Technical Debt Cripples Software Developer Productivity
Paper in proceeding, 2018

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.

Software Development

Wasted Time

Technical Debt

Software Productivity

Empirical Study

Longitudinal Study

Author

Terese Besker

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Antonio Martini

University of Oslo

Jan Bosch

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering

02705257 (ISSN)

105-114
9781450357135 (ISBN)

2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt, TechDebt 2018
Göteborg, Sweden,

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1145/3194164.3194178

More information

Latest update

2/17/2022