How to get away with technical debt: An explorative multiple-case study on autonomous teams and technical debt management

Abstract

Technical debt (TD) is constantly accumulating throughout software development processes. In many autonomous teams this technical debt will damage and injure the process, prohibiting them from adding new functionalities to their products. Tech companies must therefore understand how they can manage TD to avoid getting stuck fixing bad code. In the research on technical debt management (TDM), there seems to be a lack of empirical studies that examine how TD is managed in autonomous teams. Some frameworks are developed with the purpose of investigating TDM but lack the empirical validation and reliability.

This study investigates how autonomous teams actively manage technical debt, by conducting a multiple-case study in a Norwegian fintech company. The teams are studied by utilizing the TDM framework, measuring autonomous teams’ degree of maturity within different TDM activities in order to understand their current state of practice and how to further improve these.

The study found that all autonomous teams practiced TDM, but to various extents. Some teams had structured processes, while others had no clear strategies. Most of the teams were ranked with what the framework call “received level of maturity”, and conducted TDM activities occasionally based on their current needs. The study also found challenges related to the TDM frameworks maturity levels relation to TDM success, and identified that TDM activities ranked as highly mature did not necessarily translate into higher TDM success.

The study identified a need for the TDM framework to be further empirically tested and iterated on for it to work as a an accurate tool for understanding and improving autonomous teams’ TDM processes.

Keywords: agile software development, autonomous teams, technical debt, technical debt management, case study