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Phil Diegmann
Research

HICSS 54, 6826–6835 · 2021

“The Second Vice is Lying, the First is Running into Debt.” Antecedents and Mitigating Practices of Social Debt: an Exploratory Study in Distributed Software Development Teams

Dreesen, T., Hennel, P., Rosenkranz, C., Kude, T.

Paper

Social debt is the accumulated coordination and communication liability of a team. Tracking it alongside technical debt may help distributed teams spot problems that code metrics do not show.

My role: co-author.

Study

An exploratory case study of eight distributed agile software development teams in two organisations, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study identifies antecedents of social debt and practices that mitigate it.

Why it matters in practice

Remote teams can accumulate coordination and communication liabilities that issue trackers and code may not show. The mitigating practices give team leads starting points.