Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization: An Industrial Case Study
This addresses the challenge of integrating business perspectives into technical debt management for software development teams, though it is incremental as it builds on existing prioritization methods.
The paper tackled the problem of prioritizing technical debt by evolving and evaluating a business-driven approach through a five-month industrial case study, resulting in alignment of business criteria between stakeholders and a downward trend in technical debt affecting high-value assets.
Incorporating the business perspective into prioritizing technical debt is essential to contribute to decision making in industry. In this paper, we evolve and evaluate a business-driven approach for technical debt prioritization. The approach was evaluated during a five-month industrial case study with business and technical stakeholders' active participation. The results show that the approach contributed to aligning business criteria between the business and technical stakeholders. We also observed a downward trend in the amount of technical debt that affects high-value business assets. Moreover, we identified eight business factors that affect the decision making related to the prioritization of technical debt. The study results suggest that the proposed business-driven technical debt prioritization approach can help teams to focus their efforts on paying off the business' most relevant debt.