Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2018

Abstract

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor to describe the trade-off between short-term workarounds and long-term goals in software development. Despite being widely used to explain technical issues in business terms, industry and academia still lack a proper way to manage technical debt while explicitly considering business priorities. In this paper, we report on a multiple-case study of how two big software development companies handle technical debt items, and we show how taking the business perspective into account can improve the decision making for the prioritization of technical debt. We also propose a first step toward an approach that uses business process management (BPM) to manage technical debt. We interviewed a set of IT business stakeholders, and we collected and analyzed different sets of technical debt items, comparing how these items would be prioritized using a purely technical versus a business-oriented approach. We found that the use of business process management to support technical debt management makes the technical debt prioritization decision process more aligned with business expectations. We also found evidence that the business process management approach can help technical debt management achieve business objectives.

Keywords

Business Process Management, Technical Debt, Technical Debt Management, Technical Debt Prioritization

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Madrid, Spain, 2018 September 23-29

First Page

655

Last Page

664

ISBN

9781538678701

Identifier

10.1109/ICSME.2018.00075

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2018.00075

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