Architectural technical debt in embedded systems

Book chapter, 2020

Agile software development (ASD) has been employed effectively in the development of embedded systems, contributing to speeding up the delivery of value to the customers. However, some obstacles have been found, limiting the application of ASD to such a domain. This chapter focuses on one such challenges, the degradation of the system architecture over time, which is called, in literature, Architectural Technical Debt (ATD). Software engineering is an individual activity and the causes for ATD accumulation can be related to suboptimal decision taken by individual employees. New employees as well are more subjected to accumulating ATD due to the natural noncomplete understanding of the architecture and patterns. The chapter summarizes the causes, trends, consequences, and possible solutions related to the management of ATD. The results are all based on a strong collaboration with several software-intensive systems industries located in northern Europe and, consequently, relevant to all Industry 4.0 companies.