- Version
- Download 29
- File Size 1.02 MB
- Create Date December 10, 2025
- Download
I gave a talk at the Embedded Software Engineering (ESE) congress in Sindelfingen on December 4th, 2025. The ESE congress is Germany’s leading series of meetings for the embedded software industry. This talk is based on a paper by Yuanfang Cai, Rick Kazman, and me which is titled "Increasing Software Development Velocity by Paying Down Design Debt".
In this talk I explained why the velocity of software development projects is often compromised by a common and pernicious form of technical debt, called design debt, or architecture debt. This debt is incurred when there are improper dependencies among software entities. This form of debt is ever-present in complex software development projects. It is actually the root cause of most code-level issues and is recently increasing significantly with the use of AI-based coding tools and assistants. However, it often goes unnoticed until it is crippling the project, limiting growth and agility. Design debt is highly prevalent and relevant in the context of embedded software systems because these systems typically have demanding quality requirements and a long lifecycle, which requires a sustainable and evolvable design structure.
