Making the invisible visible: an undergraduate thesis proposes a method to expose technical debt in agile teams
Iago Rodrigues Gonçalves defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis investigating how to identify, measure and communicate technical debt — a problem that gains weight in agile methodologies focused on continuous delivery.
Brasília, July 6, 2018
Every development team pays, sooner or later, the price of decisions made in a hurry. The core question of the undergraduate thesis defended by Iago Rodrigues Gonçalves in July 2018 at FCTE/UnB is how to make that bill visible to those who need to decide on it — advised by Prof. André Luiz Peron Martins Lanna .
The term technical debt was born as a useful metaphor: the quality loss accumulated in a codebase works like a loan an organization takes to accelerate delivery — with interest that shows up as reduced productivity in the long run. In agile methodologies, with their emphasis on short cycles and continuous functional delivery, the metaphor becomes even more relevant. But the problem, the author argues, is that debt only becomes actionable when stakeholders can actually see it.
The work maps existing techniques to identify, measure, and communicate technical debt within an agile context, revisits metrics proposed in the literature, and finally proposes a method of its own — capable of expressing accumulated debt both in effort metrics and in financial values. The duality is not accidental: engineers talk in effort, managers talk in money, and a technical debt spoken in a single language is rarely acted upon.
The research sits in the software quality field and touches the recurring themes of verification, validation and testing in the advisor’s research line. By proposing a practical management artifact rather than only a review of the problem, the work contributes to raising technical decisions to the same discussion level long occupied by business decisions.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions, with strong activity in software quality .