Technical debt is a metaphor that software developers and managers increasingly use to communicate key trade-offs between business constraints and internal quality issues, especially those related to time to market. While other software engineering disciplines---such as software sustainability, maintenance and evolution, refactoring, software quality, and empirical software engineering---have produced results relevant to managing technical debt, none of them alone suffices to model, manage, and communicate the different facets of the complex trade-offs involved in managing technical debt. Similarly, while many software engineering practices can be used to get ahead of technical debt, organizations struggle with managing technical debt routinely and strategically. Technical debt draws on research from many domains that is becoming part of the answer to the technical-debt question: how do we quantify and monitor the economic impact of decisions over time? This research includes software engineering disciplines in software aging and decay, risk management, qualitative methods and appreciation for context, software metrics, program analysis, and software quality. |