Volume 11 Number 2 (Feb. 2016)
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JSW 2016 Vol.11(2): 212-219 ISSN: 1796-217X
doi: 10.17706/jsw.11.2.212-219

A Flowchart for Rapid Technical Debt Management Decision Making

Congyingzi Zhang*, Yan Wu

Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, U.S.

Abstract—Technical debt is known as delaying certain software maintenance tasks during software development life cycle to meet development goals in a short run. Such compromise increases maintenance cost in a way like growing financial interest in later development of software life cycle. Despite all the negative impact induced by technical debt, enterprise architects have to leverage between incurring technical debts and meeting short-term customer and financial related goals while making the decision for whether to pay the technical debt. However, the decision making, management, and tracing for technical debt is never formalized and surprisingly done by ad hoc. This study is aimed for constructing a step-by-step decision making map which helps the decision makers consider all possible impact factors. More importantly, such standardized process would improve the efficiency, consistency, stakeholders’ communication, and documentation for technical debt handling throughout the software life-cycle. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed decision making map and the according practice, a survey is composed as the appendix of this research report. This preliminary work, although with resource constraint, is a great foundation to build on for further study.

Index Terms—Decision making, refactoring, software engineering, technical debt management.

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Cite: Congyingzi Zhang, Yan Wu, "A Flowchart for Rapid Technical Debt Management Decision Making," Journal of Software vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 212-219, 2016.

General Information

ISSN: 1796-217X (Online)
Frequency:  Quarterly
Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Antanas Verikas
Executive Editor: Ms. Yoyo Y. Zhou
Abstracting/ Indexing: DBLP, EBSCO, CNKIGoogle Scholar, ProQuest, INSPEC(IET), ULRICH's Periodicals Directory, WorldCat, etc
E-mail: jsweditorialoffice@gmail.com
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