Technical Debt Prioritization: A Search-Based Approach

Abstract

Technical Debt (TD) prioritization is the process of deciding which TD items should be repaid first and which items can be endured until later releases. The goal of the process is to maximize the value of the TD repayment with limited resources. Unfortunately, researchers have indicated the scarcity of TD prioritization techniques and limitations in them. To address these limitations, we propose a novel search-based approach for prioritizing TD using a Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA). The approach indicates which TD items should be repaid to maximize the value of a repayment activity within a specific cost constraint. An empirical evaluation that we performed on 40 Open-Source Software (OSS) systems demonstrated our approach's ability to improve the value of TD repayment by 1,796 over random search. Additionally, a user study that we conducted with developers confirmed the suitability of our approach in industry and its usefulness in improving the value of TD repayment over developers' prioritization by 423.