On the role of requirements in understanding and managing technical debt

Technical debt is the trading of long-term software quality in favor of short-term expediency. While the concept has traditionally been applied to tradeoffs at the code and architecture phases, it also manifests itself in the system requirements analysis phase. Little attention has been paid to requirements over time in software: requirements are often badly out of synch with the implementation, or not used at all. However, requirements are the ultimate validation of project success, since they are the manifestation of the stakeholder's desires for the system. In this position paper, we define technical debt in requirements as the distance between the implementation and the actual state of the world. We highlight how a requirements modeling tool, RE-KOMBINE, makes requirements, domain constraints and implementation first-class concerns. RE-KOMBINE represents technical debt using the notion of optimal solutions to a requirements problem. We show how this interpretation of technical debt may be useful in deciding how much requirements analysis is sufficient.