Revealing Social Debt with the CAFFEA Framework: An Antidote to Architectural Debt

Large software companies need a well-managed Software Architecture to support continuous and fast delivery of customer value both in the short and long term. However, this can be hindered if both evolution and maintenance of existing systems are hampered by Architectural Technical Debt. To avoid the accumulation and the costly consequences of ATD, it is critical that the responsibilities to minimize it are well understood and shared in a large software organization. In this paper, we argue that an organizational model, based on a well validated framework such as CAFFEA, can be used to reveal sub-optimalities in the social structure of the organization: in other words, it can reveal Social Debt. Such sub-optimality, according to previous work, leads to the accumulation of ATD. In conclusion, using the CAFFEA framework as an organizational analysis tool, can reveal weak spots (Social Debt) in the organization and can help preventing costly ATD and its consequences.