Organização do corpo de conhecimento sobre dívida técnica: tipos, indicadores, estratégias de gerenciamento e causas

Abstract

The concept of technical debt contextualizes the problem of pending development tasks as a type of debt which brings a short-term benefit for the project, but that may have to be paid later with interest in the development process. The consequences of these problems can be observed in unexpected delays, changes, and in the difficulty for achieving the quality criteria agreed for the project. It is usual for a software project to incur debt during its development process. However, its presence brings risks for the project and hampers its development. Its identification, measurement, and management helps project managers to take decisions, resulting in improved software quality and productivity in performing development activities. But, before identifying, measuring and / or managing the debt, the development team need to understand what are the existing types and their indicators, which management techniques are being proposed, and what leads professionals to incur the debt. This work proposes the organization of a body of knowledge for the technical debt area considering its types, indicators, management strategies, and causes for its occurrence. In addition, we shared the organized body of knowledge through the TD Wiki infrastructure. To achieve these goals, the research followed two lines of work: (1) performing a systematic mapping study complemented by a survey study to collect evidence that would allow the organization of knowledge about technical debt; (2) structuring the information identified from the studies in a taxonomy of types of debt and in an infrastructure that supports its collaborative sharing and evolution.