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The Effects of Software Process Evolution to Technical Debt—Perceptions from Three Large Software Projects

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Managing Software Process Evolution

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Abstract

This chapter describes a qualitative study with the goal to explore and understand how software process evolution affects technical debt. We investigated three large software development projects with a long development history with the aim to understand how software processes had evolved during the life cycle and how this evolution affected technical debt. We observed how companies had changed their software processes as well as the reasons, benefits, and consequences of these changes on technical debt. The main driving force for the software process evolution was business pressure from management to increase productivity and become cost-efficient. However, these changes were also the source of technical debt. The results show that software process evolution has a clear effect to technical debt. Software process evolution can be used to decrease technical debt by adopting new methods, tools, and techniques. However, software process evolution includes several challenges. These challenges have a possibility to decrease the productivity and quality of new software processes and technical debt might increase.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the companies that took part in this research and all the interviewees who shared valuable information related to the studied cases. This research has been carried out in Digile Need for Speed program, and funded by Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business and Management, Innovation & Software, Lappeenranta University of Technology, P.O. Box 20, 53851, Lappeenranta, Finland

    Jesse Yli-Huumo & Andrey Maglyas

  2. Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 15400, 00076, Aalto, Finland

    Kari Smolander

Authors
  1. Jesse Yli-Huumo
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  2. Andrey Maglyas
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  3. Kari Smolander
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jesse Yli-Huumo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Marco Kuhrmann

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Jürgen Münch

  3. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Ita Richardson

  4. Technische Universität Clausthal, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Andreas Rausch

  5. Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    He Zhang

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Yli-Huumo, J., Maglyas, A., Smolander, K. (2016). The Effects of Software Process Evolution to Technical Debt—Perceptions from Three Large Software Projects. In: Kuhrmann, M., Münch, J., Richardson, I., Rausch, A., Zhang, H. (eds) Managing Software Process Evolution. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31545-4_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31545-4_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31543-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31545-4

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