Technical Debt (TD) is a software engineering metaphor that resembles the production of poor-quality code to going into debt. In particular, a development team that “ saves ” effort while developing by not removing inefficiencies, has to “ pay-back ” with interest, in the form of additional maintenance costs (i.e., fixing bugs, adding features, etc.) due to the poor maintainability of the developed code. Although maintainability assurance is an established practice in traditional software development (lately known as TD management), it has still not attracted the attention of scientific software developers; i.e., researchers writing code and developing tools for purely research purposes. Nevertheless, based on the literature and practice, maintainability seems to be ranked as an important key-driver for the development of such applications; since the effort needed to update the code before the experimentation (e.g., executing a simulation) is common and should not receive low priority. In this paper, we present the outcome of a 3-year research project on Technical Debt Management (TDM) for scientific software development. The outcome of the project is a framework (termed: EXA2PRO TDM framework) and an accompanying platform for assisting scientific software developers in managing the TD of their applications. The framework is a collection of methods tailored for the mainstream programming languages of scientific software development, which have been empirically validated through five pilot applications. The majority of the EXA2PRO framework suggestions have been applied by scientific software developers and eased future maintenance activities.

In resent years monolith architecture gains once again a lot of popularity, in order to reduce costs and time compared to more complicated architectures. Taking into account the advantages of micro-service, and trying to embed some of them to monolith architectures, we come to the creation of modular monoliths. This type of design can be consider quite new, and so there isn’t yet a specific architecture design that someone could follow if they wish to use it. In this paper we present an architectural design and an implementation strategy for modular monoliths. To evaluate the usefulness of this architecture, we have conducted a study, validating the design and its implementation. In this study 12 architects from different companies took part, expressing some concerns regarding the feasibility in bigger project but also giving an overall positive feedback for the design.