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Alan MacCormack. Page, Austin M.(Austin Markley) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program. System Design and Management Program. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program 2019-07-18T20:30:06Z 2019-07-18T20:30:06Z 2019 2019 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121795 1103445476 Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2019 Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (pages 93-96). The Air Force is currently paying a cost for the mismanagement of its software development activities. Software-intensive systems are consistently plagued with cost, schedule, and performance issues, which in the current fiscal environment is unsustainable. There has been much research on the benefits of process improvement, yet the concept of product health is largely ignored. Technical debt - the consequence of making short-term design decisions at the expense of long-term health - has been accumulating within code bases as developers and managers struggle to identify, quantify, and manage it properly. In this thesis, an extensive literature search is performed to define technical debt, explain its implications, and highlight methods to quantify and visualize it so organizations can address it explicitly. Through the use of architectural health analysis tools, a set of metrics is defined and used in case studies to highlight the extent to which the Air Force has lost control of its software and the price it has to pay because of it. Ultimately, eleven recommendations are given on how to incorporate architectural health analysis tools into software development activities to prevent, identify, manage, and reduce the amount of technical debt across product lifecycles. by Austin M. Page. S.M. in Engineering and Management S.M.inEngineeringandManagement Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program 98 pages eng Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 Engineering and Management Program. System Design and Management Program. Technical debt : the cost of doing nothing Thesis application/pdf 2019-07-18T20:30:03Z Publication Master SysDes unknown unknown <Publication xmlns="https://www.openaire.eu/cerif-profile/1.1/" id="79c89e56-d18b-4b82-97e8-e4d42d40adb3"> <Type xmlns="https://www.openaire.eu/cerif-profile/vocab/COAR_Publication_Types">http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_1843</Type> <Language>eng</Language> <Title>Technical debt : the cost of doing nothing</Title> <PublishedIn> <Publication> </Publication> </PublishedIn> <PublicationDate>2019</PublicationDate> <Authors> <Author> <DisplayName>Page, Austin M.(Austin Markley)</DisplayName> <Affiliation> <OrgUnit> </OrgUnit> </Affiliation> </Author> </Authors> <Editors> </Editors> <Publishers> <Publisher> <DisplayName>Massachusetts Institute of Technology</DisplayName> <OrgUnit /> </Publisher> </Publishers> <License>http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582</License> <Keyword>Engineering and Management Program.</Keyword> <Keyword>System Design and Management Program.</Keyword> <Abstract>The Air Force is currently paying a cost for the mismanagement of its software development activities. Software-intensive systems are consistently plagued with cost, schedule, and performance issues, which in the current fiscal environment is unsustainable. There has been much research on the benefits of process improvement, yet the concept of product health is largely ignored. Technical debt - the consequence of making short-term design decisions at the expense of long-term health - has been accumulating within code bases as developers and managers struggle to identify, quantify, and manage it properly. In this thesis, an extensive literature search is performed to define technical debt, explain its implications, and highlight methods to quantify and visualize it so organizations can address it explicitly. Through the use of architectural health analysis tools, a set of metrics is defined and used in case studies to highlight the extent to which the Air Force has lost control of its software and the price it has to pay because of it. Ultimately, eleven recommendations are given on how to incorporate architectural health analysis tools into software development activities to prevent, identify, manage, and reduce the amount of technical debt across product lifecycles.</Abstract> <Access xmlns="http://purl.org/coar/access_right" > </Access> </Publication>