Technical debt : the cost of doing nothing

The Air Force is currently paying a cost for the mismanagement of its software development activities. Software-intensive systems are consistently plagued with cost, schedule, and performance issues, which in the current fiscal environment is unsustainable. There has been much research on the benefits of process improvement, yet the concept of product health is largely ignored. Technical debt - the consequence of making short-term design decisions at the expense of long-term health - has been accumulating within code bases as developers and managers struggle to identify, quantify, and manage it properly. In this thesis, an extensive literature search is performed to define technical debt, explain its implications, and highlight methods to quantify and visualize it so organizations can address it explicitly. Through the use of architectural health analysis tools, a set of metrics is defined and used in case studies to highlight the extent to which the Air Force has lost control of its software and the price it has to pay because of it. Ultimately, eleven recommendations are given on how to incorporate architectural health analysis tools into software development activities to prevent, identify, manage, and reduce the amount of technical debt across product lifecycles.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Page, Austin M.(Austin Markley)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alan MacCormack.

• Engineering and Management Program.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121795

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121795