Technical Debt Analysis in Parallel Multi-Disciplinary Systems Engineering
Stefan Biffl, Fajar J. Ekaputra, Arndt Lüder, Johanna-Lisa Pauly, Felix Rinker, Laura Waltersdorfer, Dietmar Winkler · 2019
Similar to advanced software engineering, multi-disciplinary systems engineering, such as industrial production systems engineering (PSE), has to integrate partial results from workgroups that design in parallel. Due to the heterogeneity of data sources and the divergence of local data models the exchanged engineering artefacts between PSE workgroups are complex, making the automation of the data exchange process in PSE difficult and prone to technical debt (TD). In this paper, we report on a case study at a large PSE company to analyze TD effects, items, and causes in PSE, focusing on the engineering data exchange process. We identified key use cases and TD types, i.e., TD in data models and TD in data instances, which have adverse effects on project effort, cost and duration as well as data quality.