Avoiding Non-Technical Sources of Software Maintenance Technical Debt

Much of the emphasis in identifying a software maintenance project’s technical debt involves analysis of the code to be maintained. Our recent analysis of the sources of software maintenance cost have identified the major sources of technical debt for non-developer maintenance organizations to originate from non-technical acquisition and development decisions and practices. As a way of identifying and avoiding these sources, we have developed an initial counterpart of the Technical Readiness Level framework, called the Software Maintenance Readiness Level (SMRL) framework. This paper summarizes the main non-technical sources of software maintenance technical debt, their root causes, a first-cut SMRL framework, and our early experiences in evaluating it. Keywords—Software life cycle; Life cycle costs; Software maintainability; Software evolution; Software technical debt, Software maintainability readiness level