Week 5_Ramasubbu and Kemerer (2015)_Jung Kwan Kim

Ramasubbu and Kemerer (2015) examine the technical debt and the interdependency between client and vendor maintenance activities. Their analysis reveals that there do exist the dynamics of technical debts reduction and its impact on the reliability of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems.

One of the fundamental findings is that technical debt is “associated with an increase in the probability of a system failure” because it increasingly deteriorates knowledge asymmetry between vendors and clients. Modular maintenance by clients ameliorates the reliability of a system through reducing the errors due to clients more than architectural maintenance does mainly because details in architectural knowledge of a system are not well disseminated to clients’ software teams. Interestingly, modular maintenance is more likely to increase the probability of system failure due to vendor errors than architectural maintenance is. This contrasting findings is supported by the fact that modular maintenance by clients may not consider the overall architectural structure of a system, leading to conflicts with a new version of the system or a vendor-driven platform updates.

The empirical contributions of Ramasubbu and Kemerer (2015) deserve highlighting. The newly devised competing risks analysis shows the different impact of the trade-off relationship between modular and architectural maintenance on vendor vs. client errors. Mediation analysis clearly shows the mediating impact of technical debt between each type of maintenance and system failure due to client errors. The analysis is useful to present the existence of “benefit zone” out of the trade-off effect, suggesting that discretionary decision on maintenance should be employed.