Technical debt

Abstract

As the pace of software delivery increases and technology rapidly changes, organizations seek guidance on how to insure the sustainability of their software development effort. Over the past four years running the workshops on Managing Technical Debt, we have seen increased interest from the software industry to understanding and managing technical debt. A better understanding of the concept of technical debt, and how to approach it, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective is necessary to advance its state of the art and practice. In this paper, we highlight the current confusion in industry on the definition of technical debt, their contributions that have led to a deeper understanding of this concept and the limits of the metaphor, the criteria to discriminate what is technical debt and not, and areas of further investigation.