Final Thesis: A Poor Man’s Approach to Technical Debt

Abstract: Technical debt is a metaphor to describe the trade of quality for short term goals. It is used to discuss the effects of short term goals on quality and productivity thereafter. While most research on technical debt is based on code metrics or qualitative investigations, this thesis explores the possibility to derive a model to compute technical debt based on project management data. For this, metrics are calculated from the data. They are compared to a known technical debt process to assess their suitability for prediction. Hereby, the quality of the data plays an important role for the usability of the results. While the use of management data promises more insights in technical debt, it suffers from the many factors that can influence the data.

Keywords: Technical debt, software engineering metrics, empirical software engineering

PDFs: Master Thesis, Work Description

Reference: Jan-Philipp Stauffert. A Poor Man’s Approach to Technical Debt. Master Arbeit, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: 2015.