On the Suitability of a Portfolio-Based Design Improvement Approach

The design debt metaphor tries to illustrate quality deficits in the design of a software and the impact thereof to the business value of the system. To pay off the debt, the literature offers various approaches for identifying and prioritizing these design flaws, but without proper support in aligning strategic improvement actions to the identified issues. This work addresses this challenge and examines the suitability of our proposed portfolio-based design assessment approach. Therefore, this investigation is conducted based on three case studies where the product source code was analyzed and assessed using our portfolio-based approach. As a result, the approach has proven to be able to recommend concrete and valuable design improvement actions that can be adapted to project constraints.