A game theoretic formulation of the technical debt management problem in cloud systems
Georgios Skourletopoulos, Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis, George N. Mastorakis, John N. Sahalos, Jordi Mongay Batalla, Ciprian Dobre · 2017
The lack of models to aid the technical debt estimation and monitoring in cloud architectures motivates the need to develop a technical debt management (TDM) theory and practical approach for effective management decision making. The cloud is a marketplace in which services and resources are leased off based on the volume of data and the number of cloud-oriented users, which affect the accuracy of the technical debt measurement. In this research paper, we propose a game theoretic formulation of the technical debt management problem on cloud-based service level. A technical debt measurement game is constructed, parameterizing the current number of players per service, while each new end-user can choose any of the offered cloud-based services. In this direction, a technical debt-inspired throttling mechanism is also discussed for resource leasing optimization and scalability. The validation tests verify the effectiveness of our approach in real-world operations, avoiding accumulated technical debt and optimizing available resources in cloud-centric systems.