Rodrigo Rebouças de Almeida

Rodrigo Rebouças de Almeida, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza

What are the business causes behind tight deadlines? What drives the prioritization of features that pushes quality matters to the back burner? We conducted a survey with 71 experienced practitioners and did a thematic analysis of the open-ended answers to the question: ``Could you give examples of how business may contribute to technical debt?'' Business-related causes were organized into two categories: pure-business and business/IT gap, and they were related to `tight deadlines' and `features over quality', the most frequently cited management reasons for technical debt. We contribute a cause-effect model which relates the various business causes of tight deadlines and the behavior of prioritizing features over quality aspects.

Rodrigo Rebouças de Almeida, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza

Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different groups of three companies. The initial evaluation shows that the presented framework is coherent in its structure and that its results contribute to business-driven decision making on technical debt prioritization.