When Software Architecture Leads to Social Debt

Abstract

Social and technical debt both represent the state of software development organizations as a result of accumulated decisions. In the case of social debt, decisions (and connected debt) weigh on people and their socio-technical interactions/characteristics. Digging deeper into social debt with an industrial case-study, we found that software architecture, the prince of development artefacts, plays a major role in causing social debt. This paper discusses a key circumstance wherefore social debt is connected to software architectures and what can be done and measured in response, as observed in our case-study. Also, we introduce DAHLIA, that is "Debt-Aimed Architecture-Level Incommunicability Analysis" - a framework to elicit some of the causes behind social debt for further analysis.