Architectural decision-making as a financial investment:An industrial case study

Context Making architectural decisions is a crucial task but also very difficult, considering the scope of the decisions and their impact on quality attributes. To make matters worse, architectural decisions need to combine both technical and business factors, which are very dissimilar by nature. Objectives We provide a cost-benefit approach and supporting tooling that treats architectural decisions as financial investments by: (a) combining both technical and business factors; and (b) transforming the involved factors into currency, allowing their uniform aggregation. Apart from illustrating the method, we validate both the proposed approach and the tool, in terms of fitness for purpose, usability, and potential limitations. Method To validate the approach, we have performed a case study in a software development company, in the domain of low-energy embedded systems. We employed triangulation in the data collection phase of the case study, by performing interviews, focus groups, an observational session, and questionnaires. Results The results of the study suggested that the proposed approach: (a) provides a structured process for systematizing decision-making; (b) enables the involvement of multiple stakeholders, distributing the decision-making responsibility to more knowledgeable people; (c) uses monetized representations that are important for assessing decisions in a unified manner; and (d) enables decision reuse and documentation. Conclusions The results of the study suggest that architectural decision-making can benefit from treating this activity as a financial investment. The various benefits that have been identified from mixing financial and technological aspects are well-accepted from industrial stakeholders

E-Debitum: managing software energy debt

35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshops (ASEW ’20) - International Workshop on Sustainable Software Engineering (SUSTAIN-SE)This paper extends previous work on the concept of a new software energy metric: Energy Debt. This metric is a reflection on the implied cost, in terms of energy consumption over time, of choosing an energy flawed software implementation over a more robust and efficient, yet time consuming, approach. This paper presents the implementation a SonarQube tool called E-Debitum which calculates the energy debt of Android applications throughout their versions. This plugin uses a robust, well defined, and extendable smell catalogue based on current green software literature, with each smell defining the potential energy savings. To conclude, an experimental validation of E-Debitum was executed on 3 popular Android applications with various releases, showing how their energy debt fluctuated throughout releases.This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project UIDB/50014/2020

Adding security to implantable medical devices: Can we afford it?

Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) belong to a class of highly life-critical, resource-constrained, deeply embedded systems out there. Their gradual conversion to wirelessly accessible devices in recent years has made them amenable to numerous successful ethical-hacking attempts. These attacks were made possible due to the absence of proper security provisions in IMDs. IMD manufacturers have only very recently started taking cybersecurity threats seriously, a move that will force development teams to overhaul IMD designs and grow sharper reflexes in an industry that has historically opted for small, careful steps. Thus, valid concerns arise regarding the technical feasibility but, chiefly, the economic viability of adding security to IMDs. In this work, we assess the economic repercussions of securing IMDs by employing the concept of technical debt (TD) on the evolving IMD software. Our quantitative analysis reveals that security-related costs are currently well in hand, however, security-code TD amasses faster and will eventually overtake medical-code TD. The economic viability of IMDs will, thus, be ensured only if security-development efforts are allocated significant resources within the next decade

Exploring the Relation between Technical Debt Principal and Interest: An Empirical Approach

Context: The cornerstones of technical debt (TD) are two concepts borrowed from economics: principal and interest. Although in economics the two terms are related, in TD there is no study on this direction so as to validate the strength of the metaphor. Objective: We study the relation between Principal and Interest, and subsequently dig further into the ‘ingredients’ of each concept (since they are multi-faceted). In particular, we investigate if artifacts with similar levels of TD Principal exhibit a similar amount of TD Interest, and vice-versa. Method: To achieve this goal, we performed an empirical study, analyzing the dataset using the Mantel test. Through the Mantel test, we examined the relation between TD Principal and Interest, and identified aspects that are able to denote proximity of artifacts, with respect to TD. Next, through Linear Mixed Effects (LME) modelling we studied the generalizability of the results. Results: The results of the study suggest that TD Principal and Interest are related, in the sense that classes with similar levels of TD Principal tend to have similar levels of Interest. Additionally, we have reached the conclusion that aggregated measures of TD Principal or Interest are more capable of identifying proximate artifacts, compared to isolated metrics. Finally, we have provided empirical evidence on the fact that improving certain quality properties (e.g., size and coupling) should be prioritized while ranking refactoring opportunities in the sense that high values of these properties are in most of the cases related to artifacts with higher levels of TD Principal. Conclusions: The findings shed light on the relations between the two concepts, and can be useful for both researchers and practitioners: the former can get a deeper understanding of the concepts, whereas the latter can use our findings to guide their TD management processes such as prioritization and repayment

An Overview and Comparison of Technical Debt Measurement Tools

There are numerous commercial tools and research prototypes that offer support for measuring technical debt. However, different tools adopt different terms, metrics, and ways to identify and measure technical debt. These tools offer diverse features, and their popularity / community support varies significantly. Therefore, (a) practitioners face difficulties when trying to select a tool matching their needs; and (b) the concept of technical debt and its role in software development is blurred. We attempt to clarify the situation by comparing the features and popularity of technical debt measurement tools, and analyzing the existing empirical evidence on their validity. Our findings can help practitioners to find the most suitable tool for their purposes, and researchers by highlighting the current tool shortcomings.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe