Uma investigação sobre processos e práticas de desenvolvimento ágil de software sensíveis à dívida técnica – um survey replicado

Abstract

Technical debt (TD) represents the effects of immature artifacts that bring a short-term benefit in terms of increased productivity and lower costs, but that must paid with interest later on (Seaman e Guo, 2011) (Kruchten et al.,2012) (Izurieta et al., 2012). Currently, software development is characterized by a wide adoption of agile methodologies that define processes and practices that deal with a series of problems currently faced by development teams (Martin, 2003). In a recent study, Holvitie et al. (2014) conducted a survey with professionals from Finland on how issues related to TD were present in agile software processes and practices. This study pointed out that the processes and practices closer to implementation and maintenance are perceived as having the most positive effects on TD management. It has also been identified that the most commonly encountered debt items are caused by problems in the software architecture. Although the results are valid, the work of Holvitie et al. (2014) is also limited by some issues. The main one is that the data were collected from development companies based in Finland and, therefore, the results may reflect only the local culture. In this context, this work replicates the study performed by Holvitie et al. (2014) in Brazil, a country located in another continent and of culture very different from Finland. One reason for this replication arose from the interest in investigating whether the findings of Holvitie study are reproducible. Thus, this replication can be seen as an instrument of validation and reliability of the obtained results, gathering more evidence on the investigated questions. The main objective of this dissertation is to identify which agile software development practices and processes are sensitive to TD from the perspective of the Brazilian software industry. The results indicated that the understanding of the concept of TD varies greatly between the interviewees and that there are a considerable number of professionals who are not familiar with the term. Still according to the results, many cases of TD reside in the implementation of the software and are caused due to deficiencies in its architecture. Finally, of all analyzed software development practices and processes, refactoring and iteration have the most positive effect on TD. Finally, a comparison of the responses of the three countries participating in the study (Finland, New Zealand and Brazil) is also presented.