Technical Lag as Latent Technical Debt: A Rapid Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews how technical lag acts as latent technical debt, highlighting detection challenges, negative impacts on software quality, and strategies for management, aiming to improve maintenance of large, dependency-heavy codebases.

Contribution

It consolidates existing research on technical lag, clarifies its definitions, explores detection and management practices, and proposes using it as an indicator of latent technical debt.

Findings

Technical lag accumulates passively and often goes unnoticed.

It negatively affects software quality through outdated dependencies and obsolete APIs.

Current management strategies include automated updates and continuous integration.

Abstract

Context: Technical lag accumulates when software systems fail to keep pace with technological advancements, leading to a deterioration in software quality. Objective: This paper aims to consolidate existing research on technical lag, clarify definitions, explore its detection and quantification methods, examine underlying causes and consequences, review current management practices, and lay out a vision as an indicator of passively accumulated technical debt. Method: We conducted a Rapid Review with snowballing to select the appropriate peer-reviewed studies. We leveraged the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Springer as our primary source databases. Results: Technical lag accumulates passively, often unnoticed due to inadequate detection metrics and tools. It negatively impacts software quality through outdated dependencies, obsolete APIs, unsupported platforms, and aging infrastructure. Strategies to manage technical lag primarily involve automated dependency updates, continuous integration processes, and regular auditing. Conclusions: Enhancing and extending the current standardized metrics, detection methods, and empirical studies to use technical lag as an indication of accumulated latent debt can greatly improve the process of maintaining large codebases that are heavily dependent on external packages. We have identified the research gaps and outlined a future vision for researchers and practitioners to explore.