Context: The technical debt metaphor describes the effect of immature artifacts on software maintenance that bring a short-term benefit to the project in terms of increased productivity and lower cost, but that may have to be paid off with interest later. Much research has been performed to propose mechanisms to identify debt and decide the most appropriate moment to pay it off. It is important to investigate the current state of the art in order to provide both researchers and practitioners with information that enables further research activities as well as technical debt management in practice. Objective: This paper has the following goals: to characterize the types of technical debt, identify indicators that can be used to find technical debt, identify management strategies, understand the maturity level of each proposal, and identify what visualization techniques have been proposed to support technical debt identification and management activities. Method: A systematic mapping study was performed based on a set of three research questions. In total, 100 studies, dated from 2010 to 2014, were evaluated. Results: We proposed an initial taxonomy of technical debt types, created a list of indicators that have been proposed to identify technical debt, identified the existing management strategies, and analyzed the current state of art on technical debt, identifying topics where new research efforts can be invested. Conclusion: The results of this mapping study can help to identify points that still require further investigation in technical debt research

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Technical debt is a metaphor that describes the effect of immature artefacts in software development. One of its types is documentation debt, which can be identified by locating missing, inadequate or incomplete artefacts in software projects. Nowadays, we can observe more organizations using agile methods to support their activities. In particular, the use of user stories reduces the focus on requirement specification tasks and, as a consequence, creates difficulties that need to be overcame by the development team. In order to investigate these difficulties and assess whether they create a favourable scenario for incurring documentation debt, this paper presents the results of a literature review and an exploratory study. The results from both studies allowed us to identify a list of causes that can lead the development team to incur documentation debt when working with agile requirements. This is an important step in order to manage the technical debt from a preventive perspective.

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A identificação e gerenciamento da dívida técnica (DT) resulta em maior qualidade e produtividade na construção do software. No entanto, antes de identificar ou gerenciar a dívida, é necessário conhecer seus diferentes tipos, os indicadores de sua presença, as técnicas para seu gerenciamento e as causas para a sua ocorrência. O objetivo deste trabalho é organizar um corpo de conhecimento sobre DT considerando esse conjunto de informações. Para isso, foram realizados um mapeamento sistemático da literatura que resultou na análise de 100 estudos primários e um estudo de entrevista que considerou 30 unidades de análise. Como resultado, o corpo de conhecimento foi organizado e compartilhado através da infraestrutura TD Wiki.