Establishing technical debt management — A five-step workshop approach and an action research study

Context:

Technical debt (TD) items are constructs in a software system providing short-term benefits but hindering future changes. TD management (TDM) is frequently researched but rarely adopted in practice.

Goal:

This study aimed to establish a TDM process in an IT company based on a predefined workshop concept. We analyzed which research approaches practitioners adopted for each TD activity and the TDM’s long-term effect on TD awareness.

Method:

We used action research (fiveaction cycles in 16months) with an IT team that creates IT solutions for signal processing. To examine TD awareness, we (1) analyzed questionnaires completed during each workshop, (2) observed team meetings, (3) adopted a method from psychology for measuring awareness in decision-making situations called TD-SAGAT, and (4) evaluated the backlog data.

Results:

Practitioners preferred TD repayment and prioritization based on the system’s evolution and cost calculations, i.e., repayment of so-called low-hanging fruits. Reminders in the backlog items, such as checkboxes or text templates, led to a sustainable rise in TD awareness.

Conclusions:

We showed that a workshop-based approach is feasible and leads to sustainable process changes. New ideas for TDM applicable to other IT teams emerged, e.g., using a re-submission date, using a Talked about TD checkbox, and using visualizations for TD prioritization.