Towards Collaborative Technical Debt Management in Systems of Systems

Abstract

Systems Engineering is a matter of the perspective and scope where several principles of the systems thinking approach coincide. Following the fundamental system principle of holism and interaction theory, in order to understand the whole the system should be considered as a whole. Due to the phenomena of emergence, not all properties of a system can be determined or explained by its components alone. The conceptual model of Technical Debt already recognize the context sensitivity of Technical Debt as an essential factor and identifies phenomena that fall outside the core definition of Technical Debt as a major part of future research.This short paper shows why managing the parts does not equal managing the whole by introducing Technical Debt as an emergent characteristic and why the traditional Technical Debt-Management methods can only be partially applied to Systems of Systems.