Business-driven technical debt prioritization

• Ano de defesa: 2022
• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Rodrigo Rebouças de
• Orientador(a): Kulesza, Uirá
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM SISTEMAS E COMPUTAÇÃO
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Technical debt; Technical debt management; Business-driven technical debt prioritization; Business process management
• Link de acesso: https://repositorio.ufrn.br/handle/123456789/47202

Technical debt happens when teams take shortcuts on software development to gain short-term benefits at the cost of making future changes more expensive. Previous results show misalignment between the prioritization done by technical professionals and the prioritization expected by business ones. This thesis presents a business-driven approach to prioritizing technical debt. The research is organized into three phases: (i) exploratory - a survey with practitioners, to identify the business causes of technical debt interviews; (ii) concept verification - where the proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-case study; and (iii) - design and evaluation - where a design science research, with the involvement of three companies, was conducted to develop Tracy, an approach for business-driven technical debt prioritization; followed by a multiple case study on two other companies. So far, we have identified business causes and impacts of technical debt; we designed the approach for business-driven technical debt prioritization; after we developed a tool based on the approach, we finally ran a multiple case study on two companies to evaluate the solution. Results show a set of the business causes behind the creation of technical debt; and also that the business-driven prioritization of technical debt can improve the alignment and communication between the technical and business stakeholders. We also identified a set of business factors that may drive the technical debt prioritization.