Towards an Interdisciplinary Technical Debt Interaction and Visualization Tool

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.”