Two of CESE’s research scientists, Dr. Carolyn Seaman and Dr. Nico Zazworka, held a webinar on “Managing Technical Debt” addressing an audience of over 600 software practitioners. The webinar was given as part of the highly successful Lockheed Martin/IEEE-CS Webinar series that, in its fourth year, provides continuing education benefits to software engineers in and outside Lockheed Martin. Their talk addressed the latest research results and the practical applicability of the emerging metaphor of Technical Debt management in software maintenance projects. Technical Debt describes situations where software developers trade software quality for finishing a release on time. The software incurs “debt” that leads to increased future maintenance cost (“interest”).
The talk explained the principles of the Technical Debt metaphor, and its similarities and differences with financial debt. The Fraunhofer researchers provided information on how automatic tools can be used to identify different types of Technical Debt in existing maintenance projects. Finally, they explained how Technical Debt (TD) can be tracked using a TD list and how management techniques, such as cost benefit analysis, can be used to make more educated decisions about technical investment opportunities, and debt repayment.
The NSF funded research on Technical Debt is co-led by Dr. Forrest Shull, CESE’s Director of the Software Measurement and Knowledge Management Division. Other contributors to this work at CESE include Ph.D. and M.S. students from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, the Politecnico di Turino in Italy, and the University of Applied Science in Mannheim in Germany.
The presentation can be found at: http://computer.org/lockheed/11102011 or on our website.
For the latest information on our Technical Debt research please go to: www.technicaldebt.umbc.edu