LEAP – A Process for Identifying Potential Technical Debt in Iterative System Development

Abstract

AbstractSystems engineering has seen a rise in the use of iterative methods to design and develop both hardware and software systems which allow for system refinement to be responsive to user needs. However, focusing on items with high value to the user can result in technical debt, where technical compromises made for short‐term gain impact the long‐term health of the system. Current methods for identifying technical debt focus on finding existing technical debt items within a system and not on proactive identification of technical debt during the iterative system planning process. This paper presents a novel technique to identify technologies that impact the ability of the system to satisfy the needs of its stakeholders. The method is used to evaluate different choices of technological implementations in both the temporal and the functional dimensions to reduce the risk of incurring technical debt which prevents the successful delivery of the system.