A Practical Guide for Establishing a Technical Debt Management Process (Preprint)

A team of researchers including Marion Wiese, Kamila Serwa, and Eva Bittner has released a preprint on arXiv titled 'A Practical Guide for Establishing a Technical Debt Management Process.' The paper addresses the critical, yet often neglected, challenge of managing technical debt (TD)—the shortcuts in software development that provide short-term benefit but create long-term maintenance costs. The goal was to move from theoretical research to practical application by identifying which TD management approaches are actually feasible for development teams to implement. The researchers conducted an extensive action research study, replicating earlier work through a series of workshops with two separate company teams.

The study's methodology involved 19 workshops and retrospectives, analyzing a total of 108 meetings spanning 96 hours over a 30-month period. The teams were presented with various researched approaches for TD activities like prevention, documentation, and repayment, and were allowed to choose which to adopt. Key findings revealed that while teams converged on similar documentation strategies—creating a dedicated TD item type in their backlogs with attributes like 'interest' and 'contagiousness'—they diverged on prioritization and repayment methods. The paper consolidates these adopted approaches as a starting point for best practices, lists common challenges teams faced, and provides solutions. A major conclusion is a call for issue-tracking system vendors to implement native TD issue types. The final output is a practitioner-focused white paper designed to guide the establishment of a concrete TD management process.