A Flowchart for Rapid Technical Debt Management Decision Making
Technical debt is known as delaying certain software maintenance tasks during software development life cycle to meet development goals in a short run. Such compromise increases maintenance cost in a way like growing financial interest in later development of software life cycle. Despite all the negative impact induced by technical debt, enterprise architects have to leverage between incurring technical debts and meeting short term customer and financial related goals while making the decision for whether to pay the technical debt. However, the decision making, management, and tracing for technical debt is never formalized and surprisingly done by ad hoc. This study is aimed for constructing a step by step decision making map which helps the decision makers consider all possible impact factors. More importantly, such standardized process would improve the efficiency, consistency, stakeholders' communication, and documentation for technical debt handling throughout the software life cycle. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed decision making map and the according practice, a survey is composed as the appendix of this research report. This preliminary work, although with resource constraint, is a great foundation to build on for further study.
J. Softw.