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Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization

Software Engineering 2021-07-13 v1

Abstract

Technical debt happens when teams take shortcuts on software development to gain short-term benefits at the cost of making future changes more expensive. Previous results show that there is a misalignment between the prioritization done by technical professionals and the prioritization expected by business ones. This paper presents a business-driven approach to prioritize technical debt items. The research is organized into four phases: exploratory, to identify the research focus; concept verification, where the proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-case study; solution, where a design science research was conducted to develop Tracy, a framework for technical debt prioritization; and validation. Results so far show that the business-driven prioritization of technical debt items can improve the alignment and communication between the technical and business stakeholders.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.01347,
  title  = {Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization},
  author = {Rodrigo Rebouças de Almeida},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.01347},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Preprint submitted to the 35th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME'19) (Doctoral Symposium). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.00150

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:39:14.814Z