The development of software products is a massive undertaking, and organisations have to manage all artefacts involved in the process. Managing such artefacts that, in many cases, become crucial assets is important for success. Recognising assets and letting them (unintentionally) degrade can result in maintainability problems. Thus, there is a need to create a structured and organised body of knowledge that can guide practitioners and researchers to deal with the assets during the product/service life-cycle. This includes, but is not limited to, what steps are needed to understand the assets’ degradation, investigating and examining the existing methods and metrics on how to estimate degradation and understanding the implication of assets’ value and degradation.

This licentiate’s main objective is contributing to the software engineering field by providing a different perspective on assets focusing on assets’ value for the organisation. We have used literature reviews, focus groups, case study, and sample study to address this objective. The collected data is from peer-reviewed work, collaboration with five company partners, and 31 OSS from Apache Foundation.

First, we have defined the concept and terminology in a position paper. We havecreated an asset management taxonomy based on a literature review and focus groups– fours focus groups conducted in 2019 with 29 participants. The extracted assets represent not only the stages of software development, from requirements to verificationand validation, but also operational and organisational perspectives. The taxonomy wascreated to be extendable as the field evolves and matures.

Then, we have performed a more in-depth investigation of selected asset types. As a part of studying assets, in a case study, we present the impact of bug-fixing,refactorings, and new development to investigate how source code degrades. In anothersample study, we examine the longevity of specific source-code related issues in 31OSS from Apache Foundation using statistical analysis.

The work done in this licentiate includes: defining the asset concept and relatedterminology, identifying assets and creating a taxonomy of assets, presenting the preliminary investigation of tools and methods to understand source-code and architecturerelated asset degradation.

We conclude that a good understanding of the relevant assets for the inception,planning, development, evolution, and maintenance of software-intensive products andservices is necessary to study their value degradation. Our work builds on currentmethods and details the underlying concepts attempting to homogenise definitions andbring the areas of assets and degradation together. A natural progression of our workis to investigate the measurements to evaluate the degradation of assets. This licentiate thesis starts investigating the value degradation of source-code related assets. We planto continue investigating the degradation of architecture in our future work.

Background: As software is everywhere, and almost every company has nowadays a dependency on software, designing and developing software-intensive products or services has become significantly challenging and time-consuming. The challenges are due to the continuous growth of the size and complexity of software and the fast pace of change. It is important that software-developing organisations’ engineering practices adapt to the rising challenges by adopting well-engineered development activities. Organisations deal with many software artefacts, some of which are more relevant for the organisation. We define Software Assets as artefacts intended to be used more than once. Given softwared evelopment’s continuous and evolutionary aspect, the assets involved degrade over time. Organisations need to understand what assets are relevant and how they degrade to exercise quality control over software assets. Asset degradation is inevitable, and it may manifest in different ways. 

Objective: The main objective of this thesis is: (i) to contribute to the software engineering body of knowledge by providing an understanding of what assets are and how they degrade; and (ii) to gather empirical evidence regarding asset degradation and different factors that might impact it on industrial settings. 

Method: To achieve the thesis goals, several studies have been conducted. The collected data is from peer-reviewed literature and collaboration with five companies that included extracting archival data from over 20 million LOC and archival data from open-source repositories. 

Results: The first contribution of this thesis is defining the concept of assets and asset degradation in a position paper. We aim to provide an understanding of software assets and asset degradation and its impact on software development.  Additionally, a taxonomy of assets is created using academic and industrial input. The taxonomy includes 57 assets and their categories. To further investigate the concept of asset degradation, we have conducted in-depth analyses of multiple industrial case studies on selected assets. This thesis presents results to provide evidence on the impact of different factors on asset degradation, including: (I) how the accumulation of technical debt is affected by different development activities; (ii) how degradation ‘survives’; and (iii) how working from home or the misalignment between ownership and contribution impacts the faster accumulation of asset degradation. Additionally, we created a model to calculate the degree of the alignment between ownership and contribution to code. 

Conclusion: The results can help organisations identify and understand the relevant software assets and characterize their quality degradation. Understanding how assets degrade and which factors might impact their faster accumulation is the first step to conducting sufficient and practical asset management activities. For example, by engaging (i) proactively in preventing uncontrolled growth of degradation (e.g., aligning ownership and contribution); and (ii) reactively in prioritizing mitigation strategies and activities (focusing on recently introducing TD items).