Refereed article in conference proceedings (A4)
Investigating the effects of agile practices and processes on technical Debt - The viewpoint of the brazilian software industry
List of Authors: Caires V., Rios N., Holvitie J., Leppänen V., De Mendonça Neto M., Spínola R.
Editors: Oscar Mortagua Pereira, Angelo Perkusich
Conference name: International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
Publisher: Knowledge Systems Institute Graduate School
Publication year: 2018
Journal: International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering SEKE
Book title *: SEKE 2018: 30th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
Journal name in source: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, SEKE
Start page: 506
End page: 511
ISBN: 1-891706-44-6
ISSN: 2325-9000
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18293/SEKE2018-131
The current scenario of software development is characterized by a wide adoption of agile methodologies, which define processes and practices that address a range of problems faced by development teams. However, there is still little information on how these methodologies deal with technical debt(TD). This work presents the results of a replicated survey(originally executed in Finland) whose goal was to investigate which agile practices and processes are sensitive to TD. Despite this replication allows different types of analysis, the focus of this paper will be on the analysis of the effects of the agile practices and processes on TD from the perspective of the Brazilian software industry, where the study was replicated. At total, 62 practitioners from different organizations answered the questionnaire. The results indicated that participants already had a good knowledge about TD, instances of TD reside in the software implementation and are caused due to deficiencies in its architecture, the size of a debt item is proportional to its impact on the project, and, refactoring and iteration have the most positive effect on TD. This replication also contributes to the investigated topic through the accumulation of evidence about the findings, thereby increasing the level of confidence in results.