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SPLASH '13 Workshop - Technical Debt
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Home | Workshop final report
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Date: Monday October 28, 2013
Time: 8:30am-5:00pm
Location: SPLASH
2013 Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana
Website contents
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Workshop overview
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Position papers
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Workshop overview
Technical debt is
a term that was coined by Ward
Cunningham in 1992 to explain the accidental complexity that is a
side-effects of “going
faster” in the development work on a
large code base.
Technical
debt is a way to talk about the extra design and coding work
that a developer or team “owes” to
the product after making a “quick and dirty” coding fix. When developers
work quickly and make too many
expeditious fixes, the code base becomes increasingly more difficult to
understand. The cost
of adding new features increases
drastically over time. Developers “pay back the technical debt” when
they do
some rework - “cleaning up the code”
to restore a simpler and more elegant design.
Technical debt is one of the primary reasons for developers to do periodic
refactoring of their code
base. Refactoring is a step-by-step process to safely improve the
structure of code without
changing its behavior. This workshop
will explore the sources of technical debt and some of the best
practices for keeping
technical debt under control. The
workshop participants are invited to share both academic and industrial
experiences.
How to join the workshop
What are your experiences in dealing with technical debt? You
can join in on the discussion. Here is how you can become part of the workshop:
- Contact one of the workshop organizers listed below.
- Prepare an optional one-page
“position paper” -- containing
your ideas, questions, and
experiences. Send your position paper to mancl - AT -
alcatel-lucent.com.
- Note: The deadline for position papers is September 6.
- A workshop
position paper is optional, but we use the workshop
position papers to help us plan the
discussion. Here are some tips for your workshop paper:
- Your position paper might explain some of your personal experiences
(positive and/or negative) with
design and coding problems leading to technical debt issues.
- Or, you could describe some of your own philosophy of design techniques
for reducing the burden of technical debt.
- Finally, you could use your position paper to ask some questions --
some of the things that puzzle you about technical debt.
The
workshop is organized as a set of interactive brainstorming and
discussion
sessions. The workshop
participants will prepare a poster to present at the SPLASH poster
session on Monday afternoon.
Workshop Committee:
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Dennis Mancl (mancl -AT- alcatel-lucent.com)
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Bill Opdyke (opdyke -AT- acm.org)
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Steve Fraser (sdfraser -AT- acm.org)
Extra material
Extra material (useful readings, links to books and articles on technical
debt issues) will be posted here.
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Philippe Kruchten, Robert L. Nord, Ipek Ozkaya, Joost Visser, “Technical debt in software development: from metaphor
to theory,” ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, September 2012, pp. 36-38.
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