Estimating Architectural Technical Debt:A design research

Abstract

Technical debt(TD) and the sub-category architectural technical debt (ATD) are two software related buzzwords frequently used in both academia and in the software industry. The purpose of these terms is to make it easier to understand that a software decision might lead to an expected or unexpected consequence that could have an impact in the long-run. Hence, the TD level in a project needs to be under control. However, the common approach towards refactoring of a TD is to handle it when it is too late and a crisis has emerged due to its presence. In order to solve this and make the stakeholders able to determine when a TD should be refactored a tool has been developed. This tool incorporates the newly developed AnaConDebt model, which is an ATD refactoring decision model. The outcome from building and evaluating this proof-of-concept is that there is potential for such a tool but it is not yet there. The underlying model needs to be further developed incorporating more info used by the industry.