Technical debt is increased with C/C++, says research

Nicola Brittain, Computing, Tuesday 28 September 2010 at 09:38:00

And will increase significantly between now and 2015

Technical debt, which is the amount of money firms need to invest to bring
their IT systems up to scratch, has long been a burden for IT departments, but
with a decade of tight budgets behind us and a few further years of austerity
ahead, the amount of debt residing in IT departments globally may rise to $1tn
by 2015 from $500bn today, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Gartner's more specific definition of technical debt is as follows: it is the
cost of clearing the backlog of maintenance that would be required to bring
corporate applications portfolio to a fully supported current release state.

Gartner analysts said that this "IT debt" is a hidden risk for many
organisations, and given continued tight economic conditions, this IT debt is
growing, meaning the associated business risk is also growing.

This IT debt can also be a problem when companies or organisations want to
switch from one software system to another, and a report called Worldwide
Application Software Quality Study, from software analysis firm Cast,
argues just this.

The research suggests that the public sector is significantly less able to
switch applications than the private sector because of high levels of technical
debt (the result of not maintaining or managing software systems adequately).
The insurance sector is the second least able to change because of technical
debt resulting from problems with legacy infrastructures.

The research from Cast delineates technical debt according to the type of
coding language used within a company?s software.

The research states that the although the average technical debt per 1,000
lines of code is about $2,819, the violations present will obviously vary
considerably according to the code used and therefore affect the amount that
needs to be invested to bring it up to scratch.

Unsurprisingly, when ABAP, Cobol, .Net, J2EE and C/C++ were compared, SAP's
proprietary code ABAP returned the fewest violations per lines of code at 20 per
1,000 lines. This compares with 438 for C or C++.

However, Jitendra Subramanyam, director of product strategy and research for
the firm, said: ?Companies need to work out whether they want to tie themselves
into a proprietary programs coded on ABAP for example, which are not easy to
modify and are pretty rigid in terms of what they have been programmed to do,
and a more flexible programming language such as C/C++.?

In other areas of the study, Cast found that Cobol, a language used widely in
the financial sector, scored significantly better in terms of security benefits
than the other languages. While newer languages Java and .Net scored lowest for
performance.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2270554/technical-debt-increased-c-c