The use of incentives to promote Technical Debt management
This research is significant for software managers and development teams as it aims to understand the active communication and management strategies for technical debt, a known issue in software development.
This paper addresses the lack of empirical research on how software managers communicate and manage technical debt. It highlights the importance of keeping technical debt low due to its negative impact on productivity, morale, and software quality.
When developing software, it is vitally important to keep the level of technical debt down since it is well established from several studies that technical debt can, e.g., lower the development productivity, decrease the developers' morale, and compromise the overall quality of the software. However, even if researchers and practitioners working in today's software development industry are quite familiar with the concept of technical debt and its related negative consequences, there has been no empirical research focusing specifically on how software managers actively communicate and manage the need to keep the level of technical debt as low as possible.