Business opportunity
Technical debt in software development consists of sub-optimal design solutions that are beneficial in the short term, but create costly negative impact in the long run, e.g. costly maintenance changes and impossibility to evolve the system. Although strategically necessary in development stages, substantial software development resources are wasted on managing technical debt as it is accumulating. If not attended timely, technical debt causes difficulties in releasing business value to customers, development crises, project failures, etc. AnaConDebt is a tool for systematic analysis and management of technical debt.
Inven2 seeks development partners and/or licensees for the technology.
Technology description
Based on research from the University of Oslo and Chalmers University of Technology, including several practical case studies in collaboration with 15 large software companies, Assoc. Prof. Antonio Martini has developed a prototype of the tool AnaConDebt, to estimate and manage technical debt and its impacts. The solution gives aid in structurally assessing the costs and risks of technical debt, aggregating input from different parts of the organization. The tool provides a calculation method to obtain a quantitative indicator of the future negative impact of the existing technical debt in a company shared across SW teams and stakeholders.
Screenshots from AnaConDebt: Assessment of severity (color) and cost (size), Localization of issues across applications and organization, Risk and Impact analysis, and Prioritization guidance.
Advantages
AnaConDebt will provide full overview and impact analysis of technical debt and will integrated with codebase measurement tools (like SonarQube and Ndepend) and project management tools (like Jira).
Publications
An empirically developed method to aid decisions on architectural technical debt refactoring: AnaConDebt. ICSE (Companion Volume) 2016: 31-40
