Technical debt management entails the quantification of principal and interest. In our previous work we had introduced a framework for calculating the Technical Debt Breaking Point (TD-BP), which is a point in time where the accumulated interest becomes larger than the principal; thus the debt of the company is no longer sustainable after this point in time. In this paper, we instantiate this framework and validate its ability to assess the breaking point of source code modules in an industrial setting. The results of the validation suggest that the calculated TD-BP is strongly correlated to experts' opinion on the sustainability of modules, and that it can accurately rank components, based on their maintenance difficulty. • Software and its engineering → Software creation and management; Designing software; Software design engineering • Social and professional topics → Professional topics; Management of computing and information systems; Quality assurance KEYWORDS
Trying to expand this work, Ampatzoglou et al. REF instantiate and validate FITTED, a framework that assesses the breaking point of source code modules to support decision making with respect to investments on improving quality of a software.
A framework for managing interest in technical debt: an industrial validation
TechDebt '18
Computer Science