Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization

Abstract: Technical debt happens when teams take shortcuts on software development to gain short-term benefits at the cost of making future changes more expensive. Previous results show that there is a misalignment between the prioritization done by technical professionals and the prioritization expected by business ones. This paper presents a business-driven approach to prioritize technical debt items. The research is organized into four phases: exploratory, to identify the research focus; concept verification, where the proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-case study; solution, where a design science research was conducted to develop Tracy, a framework for technical debt prioritization; and validation. Results so far show that the business-driven prioritization of technical debt items can improve the alignment and communication between the technical and business stakeholders.