An Analysis of Technical Debt Management Through Resources Allocation Policies in Software Maintenance Process

This paper presents an analysis of technical debt management through resources allocation policies in software maintenance process during its operation to demonstrate how different strategies leads to the emergence of different behaviors along the evolution path. To achieve this objective, this work used the System Dynamic approach for building a computational simulation model based on extensive literature review and secondary data. Most of the works that applied the System Dynamics on software projects research, focused on initial phases of its life cycle, leaving a gap to be explored regarding the long-term behaviors of the operation and maintenance phases. The results demonstrated that the excessive focus on the perfective maintenance activities could be more costly than performing regular preventive maintenance to reduce the technical debt incurred, ending up with fewer functionalities deployed, higher backlog, lower productivity, lower maintainability and higher technical principal.