Welcome to the TechDebt 2020 website.

Technical debt describes a universal software development phenomenon: design or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term but set up a technical context that can make future changes more costly or impossible. Software developers and managers increasingly use the concept to communicate key tradeoffs related to release and quality issues. The goal of this two-day conference is to bring together leading software researchers, practitioners, and tool vendors to explore theoretical and practical techniques that manage technical debt.

The Managing Technical Debt workshop series has provided a forum since 2010 for practitioners and researchers to discuss issues related to technical debt and share emerging practices used in software-development organizations. A week-long Dagstuhl Seminar on Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering has produced a consensus definition for technical debt, a draft conceptual model, and a research roadmap.

To accelerate progress, an expanded two-day working conference format has become essential. The third edition of the TechDebt Conference will be held jointly with ICSE 2020 in Seoul, South Korea, on May 25-26, 2020. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE.

News

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Accepted Papers

Tools Track

The Third International Conference on Technical Debt will be held in Seoul, Korea, on May 25–26, 2020, collocated with ICSE 2020.

Technical debt is a metaphor that software developers and managers increasingly use to communicate key trade-offs between time to market and quality issues.

While other software engineering disciplines—such as software maintenance and evolution, refactoring, software quality, and empirical software engineering—have produced results relevant to managing technical debt, none of them alone suffice to model, manage, and communicate the different facets of the design trade-off problems involved in managing technical debt. Similarly, while many software engineering practices can be used to get ahead of technical debt, organizations struggle with managing technical debt routinely and strategically.

Tools play a critical role in understanding the management, monitoring, and measurement of technical debt in real-world situations. We invite researchers, practitioners and organizations to showcase new techniques, methods, and tools that can aid practitioners and decision makers in these critical tasks to participate in TechDebt 2020.

Submission types

Tools track accepts two types of submissions:

• Tool presentation papers (up to 5 pages): describe innovative and original tools addressing technical debt issues or aiming at the management of technical debt. Submitted tool papers will be peer-reviewed and accepted submissions will be published in the conference proceedings. Tool papers need to include the subtitle “Tool presentation paper”.
• Extended abstract (1-2 pages): Although extended abstracts are not peer reviewed, abstracts will be screened to ensure they meet the expectations of the tools track and are aligned with the overarching technical debt theme of the conference. Extended abstracts provide practitioners with an opportunity to showcase a tool-specific perspective.

Suggested content For both types of submissions, the program committee and chairs will look for:

• The alignment to the overarching technical debt theme of the conference.
• How the purpose of the tool is addressed and how validation experiences with practitioners have been planned or conducted (if applicable)

If a longer experience report is available, we suggest the authors consider submissions to the main track’s experience-reports category and submit a companion extended abstract focusing on the tool itself to this track.

Submission process

In EasyChair, on top of specifying the type of submission, indicate how you will participate in the conference session (you may select one or both):

• Panel participant: In the panel discussion we will engage participants and audience on how the showcased tools help address technical debt challenges.
• Tool demonstration: If you propose to showcase your tool or product from your organization, please let us know your power and space requirements. A dedicated demo session will be part of the Tools track.

All accepted papers will also have the possibility to bring a poster during the conference.

Papers must be submitted electronically via the TechDebtConf2020 EasyChair site. Submissions must be in PDF and conform to the ACM formatting guidelines applied for ICSE 2020. Submissions may not exceed the number of pages specified above (including all text, references and figures). Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2020. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Accepted papers must be presented in person at the conference by one of the authors. Accepted submissions will be published as part of the ICSE co-located events proceedings.

Important dates:

• January 27: Tool presentation papers (up to 5 pages) submitted to EasyChair (Date extended to February 3rd, AoE)
• February 20: Extended abstracts (up to 2 pages) submitted to EasyChair
• March 2: Notification of acceptance or rejection
• March 15: Camera-ready submission of final paper or extended abstract
• March 17: Early Registration
• May 25–26: Conference, panel and demos

Further inquiries

All inquiries may be directed to track chairs: Zadia zcodabux@cs.usask.ca or Fabian fabian.gilson@canterbury.ac.nz.

Call for Papers

The Third International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt 2020) will be held in Seoul, Korea, on May 25–26, 2020, collocated with the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2020).

Technical debt is a metaphor that software developers and managers increasingly use to communicate key trade-offs between time to market and software quality issues.

While other software engineering disciplines—such as software maintenance and evolution, refactoring, software quality, and empirical software engineering—have produced results relevant to managing technical debt, none of them alone suffice to model, manage, and communicate the different facets of the trade-off problems involved in managing technical debt. Similarly, while many software engineering practices can be used to get ahead of technical debt, organizations struggle with managing technical debt routinely and strategically.

TechDebt 2020 aims to bring together leading software engineering researchers and practitioners to explore theoretical and practical techniques for managing technical debt and to share experiences, challenges, and best practices.

The conference addresses all topics related to technical debt, including

• Concept and scope of technical debt
• The business case for technical debt management
• Understanding causes and effects of technical debt
• Organizational and management debt
• Technical debt management within software life-cycle management
• Technical debt and requirements engineering (including requirements debt)
• Technical debt in design and architecture (including architectural debt)
• Technical debt and testing
• Technical debt and software evolution, maintenance, and aging (including documentation debt)
• Analysis, visualization and measurement of technical debt
• Economic models for describing or reasoning about technical debt
• Techniques and tools for calculating technical debt principal and interest
• Concrete practices and tools used to manage technical debt
• Debt remediation and refactoring
• AI and machine learning to manage technical debt
• Technical debt in multi-cultural and distributed development
• Technical debt and DevOps
• Technical debt in software models
• Technical debt and quality attributes, such as security (especially at run-time)
• Technical debt in (ultra-) large-scale systems, ecosystems, platforms and product lines
• Technical debt in data-intensive systems
• Technical debt in distributed systems (including server-less, mobile, IoT)
• Beyond software—technical debt in systems engineering
• Exploratory studies of technical debt in practice
• Success and failure stories of technical debt management
• Replication of studies related to technical debt
• Meta-studies on technical debt
• Education and training related to technical debt

We invite submissions of papers to the Technical Track in any areas related to the theme and goal of the conference in the following categories:

• Research Papers (up to 10 pages): innovative and significant original research in the field
• Experience Papers (up to 10 pages): industrial experience, case studies, challenges, problems, and solutions
• Education and Training Papers (up to 10 pages): experiences, approaches and tools for teaching topics in academic courses or industrial training (e.g., lesson plans, assignments)
• Short Papers (up to 5 pages): position and future trend papers describing ongoing research or new results, descriptions or examples of problems and solutions in real-life settings that pose fundamental or characteristic challenges

If you would like to submit a tool demo or description of a tool (either to complement your submission to the Technical Track or as a separate submission), please refer to the Tools Track of TechDebt 2020.

Submissions must be original and unpublished work. Each paper submitted to the main Technical Track will undergo a rigorous review process by at least three members of the program committee.

TechDebt 2020 adopts a double-blind review process for the main Technical Track (only). Therefore, all submissions to this track have to fulfill the double-blind reviewing requirements. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

Evaluation criteria:

• Relevance: Submission must respond to Call for Papers.
• Soundness: Are all claimed contributions supported by the rigorous application of appropriate research methods? Claims should be scoped to what can be supported, and limitations should be discussed.
• Significance: Are contributions evaluated for their importance and impact with respect to the existing body of knowledge? The authors are expected to explicitly argue for the relevance and usefulness of the research and discuss the novelty of the claimed contributions through a comparison with pertinent related work.
• Novelty: Is there sufficient originality in the contribution, and is it clearly and correctly explained with respect to the state of the art?
• Replicability: Is there sufficient information in the paper for the results to be independently replicated? The evaluation of submissions will take into account the extent to which sufficient information is available to support the full or partial independent replication of the claimed findings.
• Presentation Quality: Are results clearly presented? Submissions are expected to meet high standards of presentation, including adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and respect of the formatting instructions.

The weighting and relevance of the above criteria varies for paper types.

TechDebt 2020 would like to foster Open Science Practices to increase accessibility, reproducibility, and replicability of research.

Papers must be submitted electronically via the TechDebtConf2020 EasyChair site. Submissions must be in PDF and conform to the ACM formatting guidelines applied for ICSE 2020. Submissions may not exceed the number of pages specified above (including all text, references and figures). Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2020. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Excellent papers will be considered for a Best Paper Award and invited to submit an extended version of their paper to a Special Issue of Elsevier’s Information & Software Technology journal.

Important dates:

• January 10, 2020: Abstracts submission to EasyChair
• January 17, 2020: Papers submission to EasyChair
• March 2, 2020: Notification of acceptance or rejection
• March 15, 2020: Camera-ready papers
• March 17, 2020: Early registration
• May 25–26, 2020: Conference

Register Here: Online Registration form

TechDebt 2020, held virtually on June 28-30, is co-located with the 42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), held virtually from June 27th - July 19th.

We will e-mail a Zoom link to all registrants one week before the event. Please register with an e-mail you check frequently.

Speaker: Laurie Williams

Laurie Williams is a Distinguished Professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Laurie is a co-director of the NCSU Science of Security Lablet sponsored by the National Security Agency and the NCSU Secure Computing Institute. Laurie’s research focuses on software security; agile software development practices and processes, particularly continuous deployment; and software reliability, software testing and analysis. In 2018, Laurie was named an IEEE Fellow for contributions to reliable and secure software engineering. Laurie is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award. Laurie received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, her MBA from Duke University, and her BS in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University. She worked for IBM Corporation for nine years before returning to academia.

Keynote

Risk-based Security Technical Debt Reduction: When everything’s important, nothing gets done

Abstract

While engineers are increasingly aware of security requirements, in many organizations security remains the responsibility of “those security people” and is not tightly integrated into the development cycle. Productivity and feature goals can result in engineers focusing on deployment rather than on fixing non-critical security issues or on building security into a product, resulting in an increase of security technical debt. Attackers eagerly exploit the vulnerabilities lying in the security technical debt pile. Organizations can benefit from risk-based practices for shrinking this debt. This talk will present two research projects in which risk is being used to prioritize security mitigations. The first project is focused on reducing secrets and credentials that have been checked into a code base. The second project relates to the prioritization of patching the continuous onslaught of vulnerable components and libraries that comprise a product.

Speaker: Florian Deissenboeck

Florian Deissenboeck received his doctorate from Technical University Munich for his work on software quality models. Since 2005 he has been an active member of the software engineering research community and was awarded with the Most Influential Paper Award at the International Conference on Program Comprehension 2015 and the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution 2017. In 2009 he co-founded CQSE GmbH, a company that offers the software intelligence platform Teamscale as well as innovative services that that help its customers to evaluate, control and improve the quality of their software. As head of the software auditing services, he develops new approaches for software audits and analyzes grown software systems in various industries.

Keynote

Ultra Short Feedback Cycles in Software Development - From Quality Gates to Quality Doors

Abstract

Many software development processes rely on quality gates. However, these quality gates often do not work as expected since they are heavyweight and provide feedback too late. As a result, quality gates fail to assure quality and cannot stop the quality erosion of software. In this talk, I explain how recent developments in the area of code collaboration platforms (Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, …) support a more lightweight and more effective type of quality gates: These “quality doors” enable ultra short feedback cycles to an extent that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. They are facilitated through recent innovations, e.g. infrastructure as code, but also integrate well-established methods like code reviews. First industry experiences give hope that through this approach, quality assurance finally becomes an integral part of the software development process instead of being an afterthought. On a side note, I explain why I stopped using the term “technical debt”.

Steering Committee

Technical Track Program Committee

Tools Track Program Committee

TechDebt Conference

To accelerate progress, an expanded two-day working conference format has become essential. The inaugural edition of the TechDebt Conference was held jointly with ICSE 2018 in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27–28, 2018. Researchers, practitioners, and tool vendors explored theoretical and practical techniques that manage technical debt.

Dagstuhl Seminar: Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering

A week-long Dagstuhl Seminar on Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering, April 17 – 22 , 2016, has produced a consensus definition for technical debt, a draft conceptual model, and a research roadmap.

International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt Series

The Managing Technical Debt workshop series has provided a forum since 2010 for practitioners and researchers to discuss issues related to technical debt and share emerging practices used in software-development organizations. Browse the workshop collections.

Save the date: May 23-24*

Location: Madrid, Spain

Topics will be announced soon. In the meantime think about the hard and challenging research questions in our community:

• TD will be managed as well as we now manage defects and new features
• We have a clear, operational definition of “good enough”
• We have a way to translate developer concerns to manager concerns
• TD will be incurred intentionally most of the time
• Projects that manage TD are efficient, effective and sustainable
• The benefit of upfront architectural work (vs. emergent architecture) is proven
• Tools support all aspects of TD management that are used by all stakeholders
• TD-aware development is an accepted way of producing software
• Architectural assessment is part of policy

Industry Participation !

TD depends on a healthy and collaborative partnership between academics and practitioners. Industry studies and new tool advances are critical