Maintenance Effort with Technical Debt Indicators and Feedback Speed across Enterprise Software Portfolios

Authors

  • Lucie Bieri Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland Author
  • Marie Schumacher Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland Author

Keywords:

Software Maintenance, Technical Debt, Feedback Speed, Enterprise Portfolios, Maintenance Effort

Abstract

The management of enterprise software portfolios increasingly demands a precise understanding of the factors that drive maintenance effort. As systems evolve, the accumulation of sub-optimal design and implementation choices, widely recognized as technical debt, places a continuous burden on development teams. Concurrently, the speed at which developers receive feedback on their changes through continuous integration and deployment pipelines significantly influences their ability to resolve issues efficiently. This paper provides a comprehensive investigation into how technical debt indicators and feedback speed interact to explain variations in maintenance effort across large-scale enterprise software portfolios. Drawing on extensive data collected from diverse enterprise applications, this study operationalizes technical debt through static analysis metrics and measures feedback speed via pipeline latency. The findings reveal a profound interaction effect: rapid feedback mechanisms substantially mitigate the penalizing effects of high technical debt on maintenance effort. Conversely, the combination of high technical debt and slow feedback cycles disproportionately escalates the person-hours required for routine system upkeep and defect resolution. By establishing a robust conceptual framework and validating it empirically, this research offers critical insights for software engineering practitioners and portfolio managers. The study advocates for a balanced strategy that prioritizes not only the remediation of structural debt but also the optimization of feedback loops, thereby fostering more resilient and sustainable enterprise software ecosystems.

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Published

2026-05-30

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 3 (2026)

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Articles

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