TY - GEN
T1 - Towards an Interdisciplinary Technical Debt Interaction and Visualization Tool
AU - Bi, Fandi
AU - Vogel-Heuser, Birgit
AU - Sapera, Edgar Benet
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - 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.'
AB - 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.'
KW - interaction
KW - mechatronic products
KW - technical debt
KW - technical debt management
KW - visualization
KW - web application
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85163057617&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICPS58381.2023.10128069
DO - 10.1109/ICPS58381.2023.10128069
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85163057617
T3 - Proceedings - 2023 IEEE 6th International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, ICPS 2023
BT - Proceedings - 2023 IEEE 6th International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, ICPS 2023
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 6th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, ICPS 2023
Y2 - 8 May 2023 through 11 May 2023
ER -