Aligning Technical Debt Prioritization with Business Objectives: A Multiple-Case Study

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.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
08/01/2019

Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization

Technical debt happens when teams take shortcuts on software development...
research
10/11/2019

Contextualising and Aligning Security Metrics and Business Objectives: a GQM-based Methodology

Pre-defined security metrics suffer from the problem of contextualisatio...
research
04/13/2022

Assessing IT Architecture Evolution using Enriched Enterprise Architecture Models

Enterprise Architecture (EA) help companies to keep the evolution of the...
research
11/21/2022

Data analysis and visualization techniques for project tracking: Experiences with the ITLingo-Cloud Platform

Considering the market's competitiveness and the complexity of organizat...
research
02/01/2018

Alternative Spreadsheet Model Designs for an Operations Management Model Embedded in a Periodic Business Process

We present a widely-used operations management model used in supply and ...
research
12/03/2020

Technical Report: Refining Case Models Using Cardinality Constraints

Traditionally, business process management focuses on structured, impera...
research
12/02/2017

Exploring the outsourcing relationship in software startups: A multiple case study

Software startups are becoming increasingly popular in software industry...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset