Increasing Awareness for Potential Technical Debt in the Engineering of Production Systems Engineers from the production systems domain have to cope with various challenges. These include interdisciplinarity, an ever increasing complexity, and time pressure. Due to these factors, engineers oftentimes choose suboptimal solutions, thus causing socalled Technical Debt (TD). No matter whether this TD is taken consciously or unconsciously, engineers need to become aware of their decisionsxe2x80x99 potential repercussions as early as possible. This paper presents a conceptual framework that helps engineers to identify conformance violations and inconsistencies based on formal knowledge bases. This increases awareness for potential TD. We hereby emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary inconsistencies, which are especially hard to keep track of. The framework also aims to assess the criticality of TD and thus supports decision making in the engineering of production systems.

Familiarity, Causes and Reactions of Software Practitioners to the Presence of Technical Debt: A Replicated Study in the Chilean Software Industry Decisions made to accomplish shortterm goals but affecting negatively the maintainability of the system is called Technical Debt (TD). In Chile, where software industry is rising 11% every year, it becomes crucial to understand how TD is perceived in software teams, its causes and how they are dealing with it. To accomplish this task we ran a TD survey, as a part of InsighTD. Results showed that almost two thirds of the respondents had some level of familiarity with the concept of TD. Among them, lack of qualified professionals is the most cited cause in general and, also, by software architects and developers. Conversely, planning and management is the most cited category of causes of TD. Results indicated that the concept of TD is well understood by software practitioners and that most efforts need to be invested by researchers on offering strategies and tools to support TD management.