An Analysis of Technical Debt Management Through Resources Allocation Policies in Software Maintenance Process

TL;DR

This study uses System Dynamics modeling to analyze how different resource allocation policies in software maintenance influence technical debt management and long-term project outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a long-term simulation model for technical debt management during software maintenance, filling a gap in existing research focused mainly on early project phases.

Findings

Excessive focus on perfective maintenance increases costs and technical debt.

Preventive maintenance reduces technical debt and improves productivity.

Long-term strategies significantly impact software evolution and maintenance costs.

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of technical debt management through resources allocation policies in software maintenance process during its operation to demonstrate how different strategies leads to the emergence of different behaviors along the evolution path. To achieve this objective, this work used the System Dynamic approach for building a computational simulation model based on extensive literature review and secondary data. Most of the works that applied the System Dynamics on software projects research, focused on initial phases of its life cycle, leaving a gap to be explored regarding the long-term behaviors of the operation and maintenance phases. The results demonstrated that the excessive focus on the perfective maintenance activities could be more costly than performing regular preventive maintenance to reduce the technical debt incurred, ending up with fewer functionalities deployed, higher backlog, lower productivity, lower maintainability and higher technical principal.