Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization
This addresses the challenge of coordinating software development priorities between technical and business teams, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing prioritization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of misalignment between technical and business stakeholders in prioritizing technical debt by proposing a business-driven approach, resulting in improved alignment and communication as shown in a multi-case study.
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.