Browsing by Subject "Technical Debt"

Modern software development is faster than ever before with products needing to hit the markets in record time to be tested and modified to find a place in the market and start generating profit. This process often leads to an excessive amount of technical debt accrued even specially in the early experimental stages of the development of a new software product. This accumulated technical debt must then be amortized or otherwise it will hinder the future development of the product. This can in many cases be difficult not only by the time pressure for new requirements but by the nature of the problems behind the technical debt. These problems might not be apparent and appear just as symptoms that might not directly indicate the real source. In this thesis, an AntiPattern centric approach to the identification and fixing of the root causes of the technical debt was implemented in the context of a case study of the five-year-old codebase of a startup company. AntiPatterns were not only found and fixed from the codebase but from the Scrum methodologies used in the project and thus these were also analyzed and improved through AntiPattern analysis. The case study showed promise in this approach, generating concrete plans and actions towards decreasing the technical debt in the project. Being limited to the context of this one company and project, more research should be done on a larger scale to be able to generalize the results.