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Technical debt, a metaphor for the long-term consequences of weak software development, must be managed to keep it under control. The main goal of this article is to identify and analyze the elements required to manage technical debt.The research method used to identify the elements is a systematic mapping, including a synthesis step to synthesize the elements definitions. Our perspective differs from previous literature reviews because it focused on the elements required to manage technical debt and not on the phenomenon of technical debt or the activities used in performing technical debt management. Additionally, the rigor and relevance for industry of the current techniques used to manage technical debt are studied. The elements were classified into three groups (basic decision-making factors, cost estimation techniques, practices and techniques for decision-making) and mapped according three stakeholders' points of view (engineering, engineering management, and business-organizational management).The definitions, classification, and analysis of the elements provide a framework that can be deployed to help in the development of models that are adapted to the specific stakeholders' interests to assist the decision-making required in

Traceability is recognized to be important for supporting agile development processes. However, after analyzing many of the existing traceability approaches it can be concluded that they strongly depend on traditional development process characteristics. Within this paper it is justified that this is a drawback to support adequately agile processes. As it is discussed, some concepts do not have the same semantics for traditional and agile methodologies. This paper proposes three features that traceability models should support to be less dependent on a specific development process: (1) user-definable traceability links, (2) roles, and (3) linkage rules. To present how these features can be applied, an emerging traceability metamodel (TmM) will be used within this paper. TmM supports the definition of traceability methodologies adapted to the needs of each project. As it is shown, after introducing these three features into traceability models, two main advantages are obtained: 1) the support they can provide to agile process stakeholders is significantly more extensive, and 2) it will be possible to achieve a higher degree of automation. In this sense it will be feasible to have a methodical trace acquisition and maintenance process adapted to agile processes.

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Keywords:Global Distributed Software Development Agüe Exploratory research Tools and technologies Infrastructure Global software development (GSD) is gaining ever more relevance. Although communication is key in the exchange of information between team members, multi-site software development has introduced additional obstacles (different time-zones and cultures, IT infrastructure, etc.) and delays into the act of communication, which is already problematic. Communication is even more critical in the case of Agile Global Software Development (AGSD) in which communication plays a primary role. This paper reports an exploratory study of the effects of tools supporting communication in AGSD. More precisely, this paper analyses the perception of team members about communication infrastructures in AGSD. The research question to which this study responds concerns how development teams perceive the communication infrastructure while developing products using agile methodologies. Most previous studies have dealt with communication support from a highly technological media tool perspective. In this research work, instead, observations were obtained from three perspectives: communication among team members, communication of the status of the development process, and communication of the status of the progress of the product under development. It has been possible to show that team members perceive advantages to using media tools that make them feel in practice that teams are co-located, such as smartboards supported by effident video-tools, and combining media tools with centralized repository tools, with information from the process development and product characteristics, that allow distributed teams to effectively share information about the status of the project/process/product during the development process in order to overeóme some of the still existing problems in communication in AGSD.