Identifying and Assessing the Effects of Domain Level Technical Debts in Practice

Motivation

Technical debt (TD) comes in many different shapes and forms. While academic research has so far focused on TD at the technology level, practical experience in industry suggests that more impact is due to TD at a higher level, such as domain level TD [1].

The term “Domain Level TD” (“Fachschulden” in German) was coined in 2019. It has been defined as “the misrepresentation of the application domain by an actual system” [1]. It means that the domain level design is flawed and the system cannot fulfill all its use cases.

Compared to implementation level TD, such as architectural TD or design TD, domain level TD cannot be identified, by simply analyzing the source code. Domain knowledge and expertise are essential for being able to identify and manage domain level TD. It does not always primarily affect the developers of the system, but often also other stakeholders, like for example the users. Domain level TD tends to have more severe consequences than typical TD.

The negative effects of TD and a clear reason why it should be further researched can be found in the CISQ report on the cost of poor quality software in the US [2]. They state that approximately 2.84 trillion US dollars were spent due to software quality issues in 2018. This overall sum corresponds to the GDP of the United Kingdom in the same year [3].

In this thesis project, we want to explore this idea by way of an industrial case study at QAware GmbH. There, several commercial projects are under way that are suitable candidates for investigating the following Research Questions.

Research Questions