Towards an Interdisciplinary Technical Debt Interaction and Visualization Tool

Fandi Bi, Birgit Vogel-Heuser, Edgar Benet Sapera

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Technical Debt (TD) has been investigated widely in software engineering for decades. TD comprises technical decisions that offer fast gains yet can make future changes more costly or impossible. There are numerous mature tools in software engineering to support TD Management (TDM). However, their applicability to mechatronics, core to Industry 4.0 services, is limited due to the asynchronous development cycles and inhomogeneous tools & data of the engineering disciplines. In previous studies, we collected TD incidents from semi-structured expert interviews and elaborated on their causes and indicators. Yet, we lack a suitable visualization tool to explore the dataset from the engineering perspectives of the mechanic, electronic, and software engineering that further support the analysis of discipline-specific facts and patterns in understanding the TD phenomena. This work proposes a tool to visualize and interact with the collected TD-related data while addressing interdisciplinary causes and consequences and TD types and their correlations. A prototypical web application combines different views that present and structure the data according to specific problems. From the end-user evaluation, we received positive feedback, ranging from 'valuable insights' to 'excellent method to support understanding the relationships of cross-disciplinary TD.'

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2023 IEEE 6th International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, ICPS 2023
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9798350311259
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event6th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, ICPS 2023 - Wuhan, China
Duration: 8 May 202311 May 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2023 IEEE 6th International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, ICPS 2023

Conference

Conference6th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, ICPS 2023
Country/TerritoryChina
CityWuhan
Period8/05/2311/05/23

Keywords

  • interaction
  • mechatronic products
  • technical debt
  • technical debt management
  • visualization
  • web application

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