Technical Debt: Towards a Crisper Definition. Report on the 4th International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt

Abstract

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. In this paper, we highlight the current confusion in industry on the definition of technical debt, their 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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2013
Accession Number
AD1015409

Entities

People

  • Davide Falessi
  • Ipek Ozkaya
  • Philippe Kruchten
  • Robert Nord

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Air Force
  • Commerce
  • Computer Programming
  • Costs
  • Economics
  • Engineering
  • Life Cycles
  • Maintenance
  • Measurement
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personal Information Managers
  • Resource Management
  • Risk
  • Software Development
  • Technical Debt
  • Workshops

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Economics
  • Software Engineering.
  • Systems Analysis and Design