Abstract:

In the past decade, we have been fortunate enough to work with several of the most prominent companies in the world to develop and validate our methodology for design debt detection and quantification, to improve software quality and productivity and, most importantly, to bridge the gap between management and development. In this talk, I will share our experiences and observations of this journey. In the end, technical debt management is not merely a technical problem. The effectiveness of design debt detection partially reflects the status of the organization’s management process and development culture. The reduction of design debt, on the other hand, requires better understanding of how metrics can and should be used as a bridge between managers and developers (and how they can be misused), as well as the need for improvements in education, with tools and technologies playing a supporting role.

Bio:

Dr. Yuanfang Cai is a Professor at Drexel University, and currently working at Google as a visiting researcher during her sabbatical. Her primary research interests are software design, software architecture, software evolution, technical debt detection, and software economics. She has created a number of influential concepts, methods, and tools, including Design Rule Space, Decoupling Level, Modularity Violation, Hotspot patterns, etc. Her team has created and validated the automated detection and quantification of design debt, supported by their DV8 tool suite, on hundreds of open source projects and dozens of industrial projects from various companies. She has authored about 100 publications and four patents. Dr. Cai is currently serving on program committees and organizing committees for multiple top conferences, and serves as an Associate Editor and editorial board member for top journals in the area of software engineering. The tools and technologies from Dr Cai’s research have been licensed and adopted by multiple multinational corporations.