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

2026-03-03

AI Summary

This study addresses the practical challenges of technical debt management (TDM), which often hinders long-term software evolution due to the absence of actionable processes. Through a 30-month action research project conducted in two companies—encompassing five workshops, retrospective meetings, and qualitative analysis of 96 hours of meeting transcripts—the feasibility of existing TDM approaches was systematically evaluated. The work identifies common practices and divergent strategies across multiple teams, proposes a structured technical debt item model incorporating key attributes such as interest and contagion, and distills an actionable implementation guide. All participating teams integrated dedicated debt items into their backlogs and demonstrated strong alignment in prevention and documentation practices. Key outcomes include a foundational set of best practices, strategies for addressing typical challenges, tooling recommendations, and a practitioner-oriented white paper.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Multiagent Systems: Teamwork
• Application Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications

Abstract

Context. Technical Debt (TD) refers to short-term beneficial software solutions that impede future changes, making TD management essential. However, establishing a TD management (TDM) process is one of the most pressing concerns in practice. Goal. We plan to identify which previously researched TDM approaches are feasible in practice and what typical challenges emerge to create a guideline for establishing a TDM process. Method. We replicated our previously published action research study by conducting five workshops introducing TDM with two teams from different companies. To determine the feasibility of TDM approaches, we presented the teams with approaches for various TD activities and let them decide which to adopt. Overall, we conducted 19 workshops and retrospectives, analyzing 108 meetings (96 hours) over a 30-month period. Results. The adopted TD prevention strategies and documentation were similar in all teams. The teams utilized their respective backlogs and created a new backlog item type for TD, incorporating similar attributes such as interest, contagiousness, a resubmission date, and reminders to discuss drawbacks and risks. However, they used different prioritization approaches and deviating repayment methods. The teams had to overcome similar challenges during the establishment, which we list in this paper. Conclusions. We identified the TDM approaches used by all teams as a starting point for best practices. For challenges, we provided solutions or identified them as research gaps. Issue tracking system vendors should implement TD issue types employing the identified attributes. Finally, we created a white paper for practitioners to establish a TDM process based on our results.

Problem

• Technical Debt
• Technical Debt Management
• Software Engineering
• Process Establishment
• Debt Management Challenges

Innovation

• Technical Debt Management
• Action Research
• Backlog Integration
• Debt Attributes
• Practitioner Guidelines