Expected Results and Effects
Expected results and effects for the industrial partners: The results of the SHADE project aim at raising awareness on the asset value degradation, allowing companies to take this value degradation into account when budgeting the development activities and to provide decision support to plan the degradation mitigation activities focusing on value creation. One of the main goals is to provide the companies with a framework as a means to measure, monitor and predict the degradation of their software assets with the same accuracy as the models they use to predict revenues. The project also comprises empirical studies that will allow practitioners to understand how the asset value and its degradation evolves during the project lifecycle. The results will help to gain understanding, by means of the empirical evidence, on the types of asset degradation that act as barriers for the value creation ability of the companies. The main outcomes of the project making up the SHADE framework will be:
- Metrics to measure the asset degradation and to identify the potential root causes (Contribution C1).
- A model that represents the impact that the different types of value degradation have on elements of the value map e.g. product qualities and time efficiency (Contribution C2).
- Strategies to mitigate asset degradation (Contribution C3).
We will also develop tool support that will consist in:
- A tool to be used by project-managers and quality assurance professional, to monitor, predict and prioritize the causes of degradation to be addressed in each mitigation activity, given the organizational value map (Contribution C3 and C4).
- An inline tool/plugin to the asset degradation in “real time”, to help developers during their daily task, allowing them to detect eventual ripple effects while programing or documenting (Contribution C5).
The Asset Management Framework support for the value degradation measurement, prediction and mitigation planning can then be turned into:
- Improved architectural and code quality, increased adherence to best practices and coding standards.
- More effective degradation mitigation strategies that will lead to reduced proportion of scrap and rework time, reduction of the volume of code traffic, reduced issue resolution time per bug fix. In general, reduced amount of effort devoted to maintenance, and thus more time to work on new features and change requests.
- Increased awareness about potential risks and ripple effects.
- Continuous and current measurement and control over asset degradation in the products/services/systems enabling targeted proactive mitigation actions to be taken when needed.
Expected results and effects for the research and education environment: The project is strategic for BTH research and education environment. The project will allow the research group to strengthen the research into areas in which BTH researchers have only been limitedly active, for instance building a stronger team in the area of Asset Management. The project also provides the opportunity of opening a new research branch that is not a continuation of any ongoing research activity, although can be considered as naturally related to works developed in the area of anti-patterns and code-smells, technical debt in testing and architectural evaluation. Moreover, the project will help opening collaboration with a new industrial partner, Spotify, that is not currently involved in any research initiative in the area of Software Engineering with BTH, nor any long-term research project, which will not be possible without external additional funding. Education-wise, the project also allows exploration of areas that will be input for courses to be developed and taught in the Civilingenjörsprogrammet i Industriell Ekonomi with specialization in Software Engineering. This research can also provide inputs for the new BTH initiative towards the Civilingenjörsprogram i Mjukvaruutveckling degree in whose development both Dr. Javier Gonzalez Huerta and Prof. Tony Gorschek are actively participating. Finally, the project can help creating new research and education synergies with other departments as the Sustainability Product Development and the Industrial Economy departments at BTH.
Expected results and effects for the Swedish software industry: The results of the project might have a relevant impact to other companies in Sweden that develop large-scale software-intensive systems. For instance by helping Swedish software companies to trade-off their design decisions and to plan their degradation mitigation activities, improving their effectiveness and efficiency as well as the quality of the developed products, enhancing the predictability of the development processes and of the outcomes of these processes. The tools will be made available as open source software to facilitate the wider adoption in industry.
Expected scientific results: Asset degradation expands the notion of technical debt to a more holistic view, which includes debt in code, but also tests and other types of assets over a chronological perspective that includes propagation of degradation between assets. We believe this gives the project room to make significant scientific contributions, first with foundation papers to explore the roots of the concept, and then with the results of the analysis of the data gathered in the different empirical studies planned in the project (see Section 4.4). The main publications resulting from the project will be published in high quality journals (such as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering) and conferences (such as ICSE, FASE, ECSEC/FSE), whose numbers are estimated in a minimum number of 7 journals and 5 conference papers for the project time frame (2018-2021). The focus on journal publications stems from a willingness to maximize the impact of the research whilst conference papers will primarily be used to build a stronger, international, research community around the subject. The main outcomes of the research project will be published in three main journal publications under Open Access to make them publicly available.
Plans beyond the project time-frame: This project represents the starting point of a research topic, the holistic view of asset degradation, as an extension of the concept of Technical Debt that might open the door to many new research initiatives introducing new perspectives into the problem. However, this holistic view is demanded, as well as needed, by both academia [9] and industry and our plans are to share the results of the project with other business partners by participating in BTH industry collaboration events (e.g., BTH industrial days and monthly breakfast meetings), Swedsoft STEW and other industry oriented events and workshops. We will also promote the research in the area by organizing new scientific workshops and conferences in the field and by making our results visible in the Technical Debt workshops (e.g., the MTD workshop collocated with XP) and conferences (like the Technical Debt session in the Euromicro-SEAA conference where a related article on testware technical debt [19] has been already presented).
In collaboration with:
