Business-driven Technical Debt Prioritization
technical debt, technical debt management, business-driven technical debt prioritization, business process management.
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 misalignment between the prioritization done by technical professionals and the prioritization expected by business ones. This thesis presents a business-driven approach to prioritize technical debt. The research is organized into three phases: (i) exploratory - to identify the research focus using interviews and a survey with practitioners; (ii) concept verification - where the proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-case study; and (iii) - design and evaluation - where a design science research was conducted to develop Tracy, an approach for business-driven technical debt prioritization. So far, we identified business causes and impacts of technical debt; we designed the approach for business-driven technical debt prioritization; after we developed a tool based on the approach, we finally ran a case study to evaluate the solution. Results show that the business-driven prioritization of technical debt can improve the alignment and communication between the technical and business stakeholders. We also identified a set of business factors that may drive the technical debt prioritization.