Topic
Technical debt
About: Technical debt is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 900 publications have been published within this topic receiving 13486 citations. The topic is also known as: technology debt & tech debt.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
Proceedings Article•
7 Dec 2015TL;DR: It is found it is common to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs in real-world ML systems, and several ML-specific risk factors to account for in system design are explored.
Abstract: Machine learning offers a fantastically powerful toolkit for building useful complex prediction systems quickly. This paper argues it is dangerous to think of these quick wins as coming for free. Using the software engineering framework of technical debt, we find it is common to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs in real-world ML systems. We explore several ML-specific risk factors to account for in system design. These include boundary erosion, entanglement, hidden feedback loops, undeclared consumers, data dependencies, configuration issues, changes in the external world, and a variety of system-level anti-patterns.
1,122 citations
TL;DR: This paper proposes an organization of the technical debt landscape, and introduces the papers on technical debt contained in the issue.
Abstract: The metaphor of technical debt in software development was introduced two decades ago to explain to nontechnical stakeholders the need for what we call now "refactoring" As the term is being used to describe a wide range of phenomena, this paper proposes an organization of the technical debt landscape, and introduces the papers on technical debt contained in the issue
726 citations
TL;DR: There is a need for more empirical studies with high-quality evidence on the whole TDM process and on the application of specific TDM approaches in industrial settings.
709 citations
TL;DR: A theoretical framework is created that provides a holistic view of technical debt comprising a set of technical debts dimensions, attributes, precedents and outcomes, as well as the phenomenon itself and a taxonomy that describes and encompasses different forms of the technical debt phenomenon.
463 citations
7 Nov 2010
TL;DR: It is argued that the software engineering research community has an opportunity to study and improve the technical debt metaphor and can offer software engineers a foundation for managing such trade-offs based on models of their economic impacts.
Abstract: Delivering increasingly complex software-reliant systems demands better ways to manage the long-term effects of short-term expedients. The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the agile development community as a way to understand and communicate such issues. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (e.g., modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (e.g., a deadline), and that such compromises incur a "debt": on which "interest" has to be paid and which the "principal" should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project. We argue that the software engineering research community has an opportunity to study and improve this concept. We can offer software engineers a foundation for managing such trade-offs based on models of their economic impacts. Therefore, we propose managing technical debt as a part of the future research agenda for the software engineering field.
456 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2026 | 1 |
| 2025 | 41 |
| 2024 | 60 |
| 2023 | 76 |
| 2022 | 173 |
| 2021 | 152 |