Software Engineering Institute

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. This collection highlights the current confusion in industry on the definition of technical debt, 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.

The workshop summary was published as Technical debt: towards a crisper definition report on the 4th international workshop on managing technical debt, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 38, Issue 5, September 2013, pages 51-54.

The proceedings are available at IEEE Xplore.

Sessions and presentations included:

• CloudMTD: Using Real Options to Manage Technical Debt in Cloud-Based Service Selection, Esra Alzaghoul and Rami Bahsoon
• DebtFlag: Technical Debt Management with a Development Environment Integrated Tool, Johannes Holvitie and Ville Leppänen
• Exploring Software Supply Chains from a Technical Debt Perspective, John McGregor and J. Yates Monteith
• Generating Precise Dependencies for Large Software, Robert Kroeger, David Morgenthaler, Lin Tan, Pei Wang, and Jinqiu Yang
• Investigating Technical Debt Folklore, Carolyn Seaman, Forrest Shull, Rodrigo O. Spínola, Antonio Vetro, and Nico Zazworka
• Mapping Architectural Decay Instances to Dependency Models, Yuanfang Cai, Joshua Garcia, Nenad Medvidovic, and Ran Mo
• Managing Technical Debt: An Industrial Case Study, Zadia Codabux and Byron J. Williams
• On the Limits of the Technical Debt Metaphor, Klaus Schmid
• Practical Considerations, Challenges, and Requirements of Tool-Support for Managing Technical Debt, Davide Falessi, Michele A. Shaw, Forrest Shull, Kathleen Mullen, and Mark Stein
• Technical Debt: Towards a Crisper Definition, Report on the 4th International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, Philippe Kruchten, Robert Nord, Ipek Ozkaya, and Davide Falessi
• Understanding the Impact of Technical Debt on the Capacity and Velocity of Teams and Organizations, Ken Power