Authors:
Leilane Ferreira Ribeiro
1
;
Mário André de F. Farias
2
;
Manoel Mendonça
3
and
Rodrigo Oliveira Spínola
4
Affiliations:
1
Salvador University and Federal Institute of Bahia, Brazil
;
2
Federal Institute of Sergipe and Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
;
3
Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
;
4
Salvador University and Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Technical Debt, Technical Debt Management, Decision-making Criteria, Software Maintenance, Systematic Mapping.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Operational Research
;
Project Management
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
The term Technical Debt (TD) is used to describe the debt that a development team incurs when it takes shortcuts in the software development process, but that may increase the complexity and maintenance cost in the long-term. If a development team does not manage TD, this debt can cause significant long-term problems such as high maintenance costs. An important goal of the management of the debt is to evaluate the appropriate time to pay a TD item and to effectively apply decision-making criteria to balance the short-term benefits against long-term costs. However, although there are different studies that have proposed strategies for the management of TD, decision criteria are often discussed in the background and, sometimes, they are not even mentioned. Thus, the purpose of this work is to identify, by performing a systematic mapping study of the literature, decision-making criteria that have been proposed to support the management of TD. We identified 14 decision-making criteria th
at can be used by development teams to prioritize the payment of TD items and a list of types of debt related to the criteria. In addition, the results show possible gaps where further research may be performed.
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