Context: Technical lag accumulates when software systems fail to keep pace with technological advancements, leading to software quality deterioration. Objective: This paper aims to consolidate existing research on technical lag, clarify definitions, explore its detection and quantification methods, examine underlying causes and consequences, review current management practices, and lay out a vision as an indicator of passively accumulated technical debt. Method: We conducted a Rapid Review with snowballing to select the appropriate peer-reviewed studies. We leveraged the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Springer as our primary source databases. Results: Technical lag accumulates passively, often unnoticed due to inadequate detection metrics and tools. It negatively impacts software quality through outdated dependencies, obsolete APIs, unsupported platforms, and aging infrastructure. Strategies to manage technical lag primarily involve automated dependency updates, continuous integration processes, and regular auditing. Conclusions: Enhancing and extending the current standardized metrics, detection methods, and empirical studies to use technical lag as an indication of accumulated latent debt can greatly improve the process of maintaining large codebases that are heavily dependent on external packages. We have identified the research gaps and outlined a future vision for researchers and practitioners to explore.

Context: The integration of Rust into kernel development is a transformative endeavor aimed at enhancing system security and reliability by leveraging Rust’s strong memory safety guarantees. Objective: We aim to find the current advances in using Rust in Kernel development to reduce the number of memory safety vulnerabilities in one of the most critical pieces of software that underpins all modern applications. Method: By analyzing a broad spectrum of studies, we identify the advantages Rust offers, highlight the challenges faced, and emphasise the need for community consensus on Rust’s adoption. Results: Our findings suggest that while the initial implementations of Rust in the kernel show promising results in terms of safety and stability, significant challenges remain. These challenges include achieving seamless interoperability with existing kernel components, maintaining performance, and ensuring adequate support and tooling for developers. Conclusions: This study underscores the need for continued research and practical implementation efforts to fully realize the benefits of Rust. By addressing these challenges, the integration of Rust could mark a significant step forward in the evolution of operating system development towards safer and more reliable systems.

In this Research-to-Practice Full Paper, we present the results of adopting Team-Based Learning (TBL) for teaching a Sophomore-level Systems Programming course. The goal of TBL is to "provide opportunities for students to apply their knowledge in the classroom to solve problems rather than just covering content." Based on the performance of the students in the course taught with TBL, we found that TBL had a statistically significant impact on student performance in 2 of the 5 programming assignments. Additionally, the end-of-semester student survey indicated that 88% of the students said that the team-based learning activities helped them understand the material better. Students mentioned that they felt like they belonged in Computer Science (fostering a sense of community in large classrooms) and frequently studied with some of their team members for the course assignments. Compared to a previous offering of the course that was purely lecture-based, the class as a whole received higher final grades and performed better on all of the programming assignments.