Davide Falessi – Practical Considerations, Challenges and Requirements of Tool-support for Managing Technical Debt

Managing TDD consists of three activities according to Davide Falessi: Identify the TD items Estimating the economic consequences Analyzing differences between consequences Davide states that the real challenge is #2, as we need to convince customers that time spent on resolving TD makes sense from a financial perspective. Observations here are that not all TD…

Rodrigo Spínola – Investigating Technical Debt Folklore

Rodrigo Spínola is the first presenter of the Workshop on Managing Technical Debt. The idea of his research is that if there are ‘folklore’ statements that are either widely agreed or widely disagreed with, they are interesting directions for research. The authors conducted this study in two phases. Phase 1: searching on websites, blogs and…

Klaus Schmid – On the limits of the technical debt metaphor: Some guidance on going beyond

Klaus Schmid only recently started working in the field of technical debt. It was actually conceived as a metaphor to encourage refactoring. However, this metaphor is not perfect, because you can also gain technical debt by making certain decisions (like changing your database system) According to Klaus, we need a distinction between potential technical debt,…

Managing Technical Debt – Keynote by Steve McConnell

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Definition according to Steve:  the obligation that a software organization incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that’s expedient in the short term but that increases complexity and is more costly in the long term. He starts the keynote with some funny examples: 50% of all code in one class One stored procedure 15.000…

Visit to Mozilla

Today in the TU Delft EWI Silicon Valley trip, we visit Mozilla in Mountain View where Pascal Finette tells us about the history of Firefox. In 1998 some developers of Netscape convinces higher management to release FireFox as open source. The idea was that they wouldn’t be able to compete with Microsoft anyway. When AOL bought Netscape, Firefox was put into…

A Compositional Paradigm of Automating Refactorings

While visiting the university of Illinois, I watched a practice talk by Mohsen Vakilian of his upcoming ECOOP talk on refactorings. We all know refactorings are good. Unfortunately, programmers currently underuse refactoring tools, only 10% of edits that could have been refactored were done by tools (Murphy-Hill et al., ICSE 2009) In his ICSE 2012 paper Mohsen reveled…

Newspaper: Twitter at the TU Delft

Yesterday, TU Delft university newspaper Delta ran a story on how scientists are using Twitter. In the story my defense was featured, as @grammarware tweeted all questions and answers. Click the screenshot for the story or download the pdf.