How Experience Impacts Practitioners’ Perception of Causes and Effects of Technical Debt
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Sávio Freire et al., How Experience Impacts Practitioners’ Perception of Causes and Effects of Technical Debt , 14th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2021), https://www.cs.montana.edu/izurieta/pubs/chase2021.pdf
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© 20XX IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
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Abstract
Context: The technical debt (TD) metaphor helps to conceptualize the pending issues and trade-offs made during software development. Knowing TD causes can support in defining preventive actions and having information about effects aids in the prioritization of TD payment.
Goal: To investigate the impact of the experience level on how practitioners perceive the most likely causes that lead to TD and
the effects of TD that have the highest impacts on software projects.
Method: We approach this topic by surveying 227 practitioners.
Results: While experienced software developers focus on human factors as TD causes and external quality attributes as TD effects, low experienced developers seem to concentrate on technical issues as causes and internal quality issues and increased project effort as effects. Missing any ofthese types of causes could lead a team to miss the identification of important TD, or miss opportunities to preempt TD. On the other hand, missing important effects could hamper effective planning or erode the effectiveness of decisions about prioritizing TD items. Conclusion: Having software development teams composed of practitioners with a homogeneous experience level can erode the team’s ability to effectively manage TD.