Technical debt in software-intensive systems

Technical debt is a metaphor used in software development to describe the price to pay now for earlier design and coding decisions that were “not quite right”. It is different from defects or bugs: the software functions correctly. But any subsequent development is progressively more and more expensive, to the point where they cannot be reasonably extended or maintained anymore. The proposed research is to investigate a form of technical debt hard to detect by source code analyzers, called structural or architectural debt, and to investigate the use of artificial intelligence techniques to analyse internal software documentation (in English and Chinese) to flag potential technical debt.

Faculty Supervisor:

Philippe Kruchten

Student:

Partner:

Istuary Innovation Labs Inc (Vancouver, BC)

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: