English

What's behind tight deadlines? Business causes of technical debt

Software Engineering 2023-03-21 v5

Abstract

What are the business causes behind tight deadlines? What drives the prioritization of features that pushes quality matters to the back burner? We conducted a survey with 71 experienced practitioners and did a thematic analysis of the open-ended answers to the question: ``Could you give examples of how business may contribute to technical debt?'' Business-related causes were organized into two categories: pure-business and business/IT gap, and they were related to `tight deadlines' and `features over quality', the most frequently cited management reasons for technical debt. We contribute a cause-effect model which relates the various business causes of tight deadlines and the behavior of prioritizing features over quality aspects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.09330,
  title  = {What's behind tight deadlines? Business causes of technical debt},
  author = {Rodrigo Rebouças de Almeida and Christoph Treude and Uirá Kulesza},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.09330},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication at the 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2023)