Week 5 – Ramasubbu and Kemerer 2016 – Joe

Narayan Ramasubbu, Chris F. Kemerer (2016) Technical Debt and the Reliability of Enterprise Software Systems: A Competing Risks Analysis. Management Science 62(5):1487-1510.

People know that software reliability is crucial for business, especially enterprise software systems, such as ERP, Server OS. In daily practices, however, developing and patching a software to keep reliable is costly due to the interdependencies and potential for conflict between the underlying, vendor-supplied platform and the customizations done by individual clients. Some engineers then take shortcuts to avoid huge working load. Then the reliability of systems shrinks since the shortcuts to rapidly deliver the functionality demanded by business trade off the potential longer-term benefits of appropriate software design investments. These designs are called technical debt.

Few study focused on the empirical explore technical debt since the Interdependencies, by nature, make it difficult to measure and assess the impact of technical debt on system reliability. The author proposed a classification of systems failures-client errors and vender errors-to overcome the measurement difficulty. Analyzing a longitudinal data set spanning the 10-year life cycle of a COTS-based enterprise software system deployed at 48 different client firms with a survey analysis, the authors find that 1) technical debt decreases the reliability of enterprise systems and 2) modular maintenance was approximately 53% more effective than architectural maintenance in reducing the probability of a system failure due to client errors and 3) it had the side effect of increasing the chance of a system failure due to vendor errors by approximately 83% more than did architectural maintenance activities.

The authors showed that how firms could evaluate their business risk exposure due to technical debt accumulation in their enterprise systems, and assessed the estimated net effects, both positive and negative, of a range of software maintenance practices.