Explicating, Understanding, and Managing Technical Debt from Self-Driving Miniature Car Projects

Technical debt refers to various weaknesses in the design or implementation of a system resulting from trade-offs during software development usually for a quick release. Accumulating such debt over time without reducing it can seriously hamper the reusability and maintainability of the software. The aim of this study is to understand the state of the technical debt in the development of self-driving miniature cars so that proper actions can be planned to reduce the debt to have more reusable and maintainable software. A case study on a selected feature from two self-driving miniature car development projects is performed to assess the technical debt. Additionally, an interview study is conducted involving the developers to relate the findings of the case study with the possible root causes. The result of the study indicates that "the lack of knowledge" is not the primary reason for the accumulation of technical debt from the selected code smells. The root causes are rather in factors like time pressure followed by issues related to software/hardware integration and incomplete refactoring as well as reuse of legacy, third party, or open source code.