In the software development industry, technical debt is regarded as a critical issue in term of the negative consequences such as increased software development cost, low product quality, decreased maintainability, and slowed progress to the long-term success of developing software. However, despite the vast research contributions in technical debt management for software engineering, the idea of technical debt fails to provide a holistic consideration to include both IT and business aspects. Further, implementing an enterprise architecture (EA) project might not always be a success due to uncertainty and unavailability of resources. Therefore, we relate the consequences of EA implementation failure with a new metaphor --Enterprise Architecture Debt (EA Debt). We anticipate that the accumulation of EA Debt will negatively influence EA quality, also expose the business into risk.
According to @cite_28 Technical Debt refers to invisible elements, because visible elements for improving, like new features for evolution or repairing defects for maintainability issues, should not be considered as debt. Technical debt should rather serve as a retrospect reflecting change of the environment, rapid success, or technological advancements as a possible cause for debt. However, the debt might actually be a good investment, but it's imperative to remain aware of this debt and the increased friction it will impose on the development team'' @cite_28 . Hence, tools are required to increase the awareness to identify debt and its causes, and to manage debt-related tasks. Finally, the debt should not be treated in isolation from the visible elements of evolving and maintaining. Consequently, debt is the invisible result of past decisions about software that negatively affect its future'' @cite_28 .
@cite_28
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The metaphor of technical debt in software development was introduced two decades ago to explain to nontechnical stakeholders the need for what we call now "refactoring." As the term is being used to describe a wide range of phenomena, this paper proposes an organization of the technical debt landscape, and introduces the papers on technical debt contained in the issue.