The management of technical debt ultimately requires decision making - about incurring, paying off, or deferring technical debt instances. This position paper discusses several existing approaches to complex decision making, and suggests that exploring their applicability to technical debt decision making would be a worthwhile subject for further research
To date, several methods and tools for detecting source code and design anomalies have been developed. While each method focuses on identifying certain classes of source code anomalies that potentially relate to technical debt (TD), the overlaps and gaps among these classes and TD have not been rigorously demonstrated. We propose to construct a seminal technical debt landscape as a way to visualize and organize research on the subject
Making a decision about whether to fix or defer fixing a defect is important to software projects. Deferring defects accumulates a technical debt that burdens the software team and customer with a less than optimal solution. The decision to defer fixing a defect is made by Software Change Control Boards (CCBs) based on a set of decision factors. In this paper, we evaluated the set of decision factors used by two CCBs at ABB in the context of technical debt management. The aim was to determine how a model of cost and benefits of incurring technical debt could be part of the CCB decision process. We identified the cost categories and decision factors for fixing and deferring defects as a result of interviews with CCB members. We found that the decision factors could incorporate the financial aspects when using the technical debt metaphor. We identify opportunities for further research to integrate technical debt concepts with the decision factors towards better long term outcomes.
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