Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization

Abstract

Technical debt happens when teams take shortcuts on software development to gain short-term benefits at the cost of making future changes more expensive. Previous results show that there is a misalignment between the prioritization done by technical professionals and the prioritization expected by business ones. This paper presents a business-driven approach to prioritize technical debt items. The research is organized into four phases: exploratory, to identify the research focus; concept verification, where the proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-case study; solution, where a design science research was conducted to develop Tracy, a framework for technical debt prioritization; and validation. Results so far show that the business-driven prioritization of technical debt items can improve the alignment and communication between the technical and business stakeholders.

Preprint submitted to the 35th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME'19) (Doctoral Symposium). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.00150