Managing technical debt in database schemas of critical software

The metaphor of technical debt (TD) has been used to characterize and quantify issues arising from software evolution and maintenance actions taken to modify the functionality or behaviour of a system while compromising on certain "under the hood" quality attributes in order to save cost and effort. The majority of research in this area has concentrated on software program code and architecture. Fewer research considers TD in the context of database applications, particularly TD related to database schemas, which is the focus of this paper. Managing TD in database schemas provides considerable and unique challenges, in particular for applications of safety and security critical nature. We discuss these challenges, point out potential solutions and present an industrial case study in this area.