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.
Ward Cunningham in his experience report presented at the OOPSLA'92 conference introduced the metaphor of technical debt. This metaphor is related to immature, incomplete or inadequate artifacts in the software development cycle that cause higher costs and lower quality. A strategy for the technical debt management is still a challenge because its definition is not yet part of the software development process. Carolyn Seaman and Yuepu Guo proposed a technical debt management framework based on three stages. First, debts are identified and listed. After that, debts are measured by their payment efforts and then debts are selected to be considered in the software development cycle. This study evaluates the application of this framework in the real context of software projects adopting Scrum. Action research is conducted in two companies where their projects have significant technical debt. We performed three action research cycles based on the three stages of the framework for both companies. The main contribution of this paper is to provide real experiences and improvements for projects using Scrum and that may adopt the technical debt management framework proposed by Seaman and Guo. Both teams recognized that the proposed approach is feasible for being considered in the software development process after some modifications. Because of projects time constraints and ease of use, we reduced the use of the proposed metrics to two: Principal and the Current Amount of Interest. In consequence, decision-making was benefitted by the early consideration of the debts that really need to be paid. Instead of using probabilities to find the interest, these are registered every time the technical debt occurs. During the first phase, the debts identification was improved when all Scrum roles participated, while measurement and decision-making were improved when the team was responsible for these phases. The Product Owner role in both companies understood the importance of Technical Debt monitoring and prioritization during a development cycle. With these changes, the two teams mentioned they would remain using the resulting approach. 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. Over recent years the topic of technical debt has gained significant attention in the software engineering community. The area of technical debt research is somewhat peculiar within software engineering as it is built on a metaphor. This has certainly benefited the field as it helps to achieve a lot of attention and eases communication about the topic, however, it seems it is to some extent also sidetracking research work, if the metaphor is used beyond its range of applicability. In this paper, we focus on the limits of the metaphor and the problems that arise when over-extending its applicability. We do also aim at providing some additional insights by proposing certain ways of handling these restrictions.