Software Engineering Institute

Delivering complex, large-scale systems faces the ongoing challenge of how best to balance rapid deployment with long-term value. Theoretical foundations and empirical evidence for analyzing and optimizing short-term versus long-term goals in large-scale projects are needed. From the original description—“not quite right code, which we postpone making right”—various people have used the metaphor of technical debt to describe many kinds of debts or ills of software development. On one hand, the practitioner community has increased interest in understanding and managing debt. On the other hand, the research community has an opportunity to study this phenomenon and improve the way it is handled. The Seventh Workshop on Managing Technical Debt (MTD 2015) offers software engineers a foundation for managing such tradeoffs based on models of their economic impacts.