International Conference on Technical DebtTechDebt 2019

Welcome to the website of TechDebt 2019.

Technical debt describes a universal software development phenomenon: design or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term but set up a technical context that can make future changes more costly or impossible. Software developers and managers increasingly use the concept to communicate key tradeoffs related to release and quality issues. The goal of this two-day conference is to bring together leading software researchers, practitioners, and tool vendors to explore theoretical and practical techniques that manage technical debt.

The Managing Technical Debt workshop series has provided a forum since 2010 for practitioners and researchers to discuss issues related to technical debt and share emerging practices used in software-development organizations. A week-long Dagstuhl Seminar on Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering has produced a consensus definition for technical debt, a draft conceptual model, and a research roadmap.

To accelerate progress, an expanded two-day working conference format has become essential. The second edition of the TechDebt Conference will be held jointly with ICSE 2019 in Montreal, Canada, May 26–27, 2019. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE.

News

• Danny Dig gave us “Lessons from the Exponential Growth of Refactoring Research in the Last Decade.” View the slides.
• Valentin Guerlesquin spoke on “How to Remove Technical Debt in Testing Environments.”
• The winners of the TechDebt 2019 student scholarships are Umberto Azadi, Simon Baars, and Sander Meester!
• Join our mailing list to receive updates about TechDebt 2019.

Welcome to the website of TechDebt 2019.

Call for Papers

The Second International Conference on Technical Debt will be held in Montréal, Canada, on May 26–27, 2019, collocated with ICSE 2019.

Technical debt is a metaphor that software developers and managers increasingly use to communicate key trade-offs between time to market and quality issues.

While other software engineering disciplines—such as software sustainability, maintenance and evolution, refactoring, software quality, and empirical software engineering—have produced results relevant to managing technical debt, none of them alone suffice to model, manage, and communicate the different facets of the design trade-off problems involved in managing technical debt. Similarly, while many software engineering practices can be used to get ahead of technical debt, organizations struggle with managing technical debt routinely and strategically.

TechDebt 2019 aims to bring together leading software engineering researchers and practitioners to explore theoretical and practical techniques for managing technical debt and to share experiences, challenges, and best practices.

The conference addresses all topics related to technical debt, including

• analysis and measurement of technical debt
• techniques and tools for calculating technical debt principal and interest
• understanding causes and effects of technical debt
• visualization of technical debt
• economic models for describing or reasoning about technical debt
• the business case for technical debt management
• relationship of technical debt to software evolution, maintenance, and aging
• relationship of technical debt with other activities, such as testing or requirements engineering
• relationship of technical debt to DevOps
• relationship of technical debt to quality attributes (especially run-time)
• technical debt management within software life-cycle management
• beyond software—technical debt in systems engineering
• technical debt within software ecosystems and product lines
• technical debt in design and architecture
• technical debt in software models
• concrete practices and tools used to manage technical debt
• education related to technical debt

We invite submissions of papers in any areas related to the theme and goal of the conference in the following three categories:

• Research Papers: describing innovative and significant original research in the field (up to 10 pages)
• Experience Papers: describing industrial experience, case studies, challenges, problems, and solutions (up to 10 pages)
• Short Papers: position and future trend papers describing ongoing research or new results (up to 5 pages)

Submissions must be original and unpublished work. Each submitted paper will undergo a rigorous review process by three members of the program committee. Submissions must be submitted online via the TechDebtConf2019 EasyChair conference management system.

Submissions must conform to the ICSE formatting guidelines, with the title in 24-point type and the body text in 10-point type. LaTeX users should use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf option. MS Word users should use the letter template.

Accepted papers must be presented in person at the conference by one of the authors. Accepted submissions will be published as part of the ICSE co-located events proceedings. Excellent papers will be considered for a Distinguished Paper Award from ACM SIGSOFT.

Calendar for submission:

• January 14: Abstracts for all peer-reviewed papers submitted to EasyChair
• January 21: Research, Experience, and Short papers entered in EasyChair
• March 1: Notification of acceptance or rejection
• March 15: Camera-ready submission of final paper
• May 26–27: Presentations

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2019. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to public work.

The purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

TechDebt 2019 is the Second International Conference on Technical Debt. It brings together leading researchers and industry practitioners in this growing field. Tools plays a critical role in understanding the management, monitoring, and calculations of technical debt in real-world situations. We invite organizations and individuals to showcase new techniques, methods, and tools that can aid practitioners and decision makers in these critical tasks to participate at TechDebt 2019, to be held in conjunction with ICSE 2019 in Montréal, Canada.

Submission format

Extended abstract (1–2 pages): All participants wishing to present, demonstrate, or discuss in the tools forum should submit an extended abstract. Abstracts are due January 21, 2019, via EasyChair. Although extended abstracts are not peer reviewed, abstracts will be screened to ensure they meet the expectations of the tools track and are aligned with the overarching technical debt theme of the conference. In the abstract we suggest that authors address the purpose of the tool, validation experiences with practitioners (if applicable), and its relevance to technical debt. Note: If a longer experience report is available, please direct those submissions to the main track’s experience-reports category.

In EasyChair, indicate how you will participate in the conference session:

• Panel participant: In the panel discussion we will engage participants and audience on how the showcased tools help address technical debt challenges.
• Tool demonstration: If you propose to showcase a product from your company or organization, please let us know your power and space requirements.
• Poster: A poster should describe a tool, or some aspect consistent with tools of the trade. A poster is encouraged if you would like to participate as a panel participant or with a tool demonstration.

Submissions should be sent via EasyChair and should follow the ICSE formatting guidelines.

Inquiries All inquiries may be directed to neil.ernst@gmail.com or m.bruntink@sig.eu.

Keynote: How to Remove Technical Debt in Testing Environments

Speaker: Valentin Guerlesquin

All software systems, from new developments to legacy systems, suffer from test automation backlogs, i.e., manual tests that stagnate the rate of development and innovation. I argue that such backlogs are really technical debt. I will provide a practitioner’s perspective on what the characteristics of such technical debt are. Through an analogy to financial debt, I will present approaches that are often resorted to in order to address such technical debt, which at first glance seem harmless but often lead to nightmares in practice. Many of these issues present research challenges that can have a significant impact on the practice of software development. The talk will be of benefit to both researchers and practitioners who want to avoid common pitfalls of technical debt removal in testing environments.

Valentin Guerlesquin is the director of test automation and performance testing at National Bank. He has been a software testing professional for more than 10 years. Guerlesquin has worked in several roles, including test environment management, manual functional testing, mobile, and testing process improvement. He is an ISTQB full advanced and TMMi certified professional. He has trained dozens of his peers in several organizations from telecom, to the aerospace industry, to finance.

Keynote: Lessons from the Exponential Growth of Refactoring Research in the Last Decade

Speaker: Danny Dig

In the last decade, refactoring research has seen exponential growth. I will attempt to map this vast landscape and the advances that the community has made by answering questions such as who does what, when, where, why, and how. I will muse on some of the factors contributing to the growth of the field (e.g., refactoring the definition of refactoring to include other artifacts besides source code), the adoption of research into industry, and the lessons that we learned along this journey. This talk will present the value of prioritizing the important tasks, yet often the difficult ones. Several cases studies will show that everything worth doing is uphill all the way. This will inspire and equip you so that you can make a difference, with people who make a difference, at a time when it makes a difference.

Danny Dig is an associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Oregon State University. His research in software engineering focuses on interactive program transformations that improve programmer productivity and software quality. He has pioneered interactive program transformations by opening the field of refactoring in cutting-edge domains including mobile, concurrency and parallelism, component-based, testing, and end-user programming. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his research won the best PhD dissertation award, and the First Prize at the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals. He did a postdoc at MIT.

Steering Committee

Program Committee

TechDebt Conference

To accelerate progress, an expanded two-day working conference format has become essential. The inaugural edition of the TechDebt Conference was held jointly with ICSE 2018 in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27–28, 2018. Researchers, practitioners, and tool vendors explored theoretical and practical techniques that manage technical debt.

Dagstuhl Seminar: Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering

A week-long Dagstuhl Seminar on Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering, April 17 – 22 , 2016, has produced a consensus definition for technical debt, a draft conceptual model, and a research roadmap.

International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt Series

The Managing Technical Debt workshop series has provided a forum since 2010 for practitioners and researchers to discuss issues related to technical debt and share emerging practices used in software-development organizations. Browse the workshop collections.

Register Here: Online registration form

TechDebt 2019, held on May 26-27, is co-located with the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, held on May 29-31.

The conference will take place at the Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Hotel, one of Montreal’s most iconic landmarks. The hotel is located directly above the Central Train Station, making it easy to travel to ICSE by train (VIA, Amtrak, local trains) and providing direct access to the subway (Bonaventure Metro Station).

Hotel Reservations for ICSE 2019: Get the conference room rate

The conference room rate at the hotel is $249 CAD per night for a Fairmont (standard) room and $279 CAD per night for a Fairmont View room. The conference rate applies from May 22 to June 3, 2019. These room rates are guaranteed until April 24, 5:00pm ET.

Address

900 Rene Levesque Blvd. W
H3B 4A5
Montreal, QC
Canada

Research, Experience, and Short Papers

A Proposed Model-Driven Approach to Manage the Architectural Technical Debt Life Cycle
Boris Rainiero Perez Gutierrez, Dario Correal, and Hernan Astudillo

Architectural Smells Detected by Tools: A Catalogue Proposal
Umberto Azadi, Francesca Arcelli Fontana, and Davide Taibi

Architectural Technical Debt in Microservices: A Case Study in a Large Company
Saulo Soares de Toledo, Antonio Martini, Agata Przybyszewska, and Dag Sjøberg

Balancing Resources and Load: Eleven Nontechnical Phenomena That Contribute to Formation or Persistence of Technical Debt
Richard Brenner

Identifying Scalability Debt in Open Systems
Geir Kjetil Hanssen, Gunnar Brataas and Antonio Martini

Investigating on the Impact of Software Clones on Technical Debt
Lerina Aversano and Laura Nardi

Leveraging SecDevOps to Tackle the Technical Debt Associated with Cybersecurity Attack Tactics
Clemente Izurieta and Mary Prouty

On the Diffuseness of Code: Technical Debt in Open Source Projects
Nyyti Saarimäki, Valentina Lenarduzzi, and Davide Taibi

Supporting Analysis of Technical Debt Causes and Effects with Cross-Company Probabilistic Cause–Effect Diagrams
Nicolli Rios, Rodrigo Spinola, Manoel Mendonça, and Carolyn Seaman

Technical Debt Triage in Backlog Management
Terese Besker, Antonio Martini, and Jan Bosch

Temporal Discounting in Technical Debt: How Do Software Practitioners Discount the Future?
Christoph Becker, Fabian Fagerholm, Rahul Mohanani, and Alexandros Chatzigeorgiou

The Delta Maintainability Model: Measuring Maintainability of Fine-Grained Code Changes
Marco di Biase, Ayushi Rastogi, Magiel Bruntink, and Arie van Deursen

Tools Track

CBR Insight: Measure and Visualize Source Code Quality
Jeremy Ludwig and Devin Cline

CodeArena: Inspecting and Improving Code Quality Metrics in Java Using Minecraft
Simon Baars and Sander Meester

DV8: Automated Architecture Analysis Tool Suites
Yuanfang Cai and Rick Kazman

Empirical Analysis of Architecture Technical Debt
Mahesh Venkataraman, Jothi Gouthaman, and Rajendra Prasad

Fourth-Generation Languages Are Technical Debt
Vadim Zaytsev and Johan Fabry

How Deep Is the Mud: Fathoming Architecture Technical Debt Using Designite
Tushar Sharma

Mitigating Technical and Architectural Debt with Sonargraph
Alexander von Zitzewitz

Sarif-Enabled Tooling to Encourage Gradual Technical Debt Reduction
Paul Anderson

Silverthread CodeMRI Technical Health Assessment Tools
Sean Gilliland and Dan Sturtevant

TDMentions: A Dataset of Technical Debt Mentions in Online Posts
Morgan Ericsson and Anna Wingkvist

Teamscale: Tackle Technical Debt and Control the Quality of Your Software
Roman Haas, Rainer Niedermayr, and Elmar Juergens

TETRA, as a Set of Techniques and Tools for Calculating Technical Debt Principal and Interest
Boris Kontsevoi, Elizabeth Soroka, and Sergei Terekhov