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.
This contribution presents a method to evaluate business applications. The method allows for using artifacts of enterprise architectures. Artifacts like business processes or hardware can exert influence on the application's quality and thus have to be regarded. A central aspect is to modularize the method's basic components, which are key figures and their metrics. The modularization allows for flexible usage and customization to fit the heterogeneity of different organizations. To make the method more intuitive, a key figure is encapsulated by a fuzzy logic based component denoted as criterion. A criterion addresses a certain aspect to evaluate an application and allows for using linguistic terms to represent a key figure.