Towards Prioritizing Architecture Technical Debt: Information Needs of Architects and Product Owners

Paper in proceedings, 2015

Architectural Technical Debt is a metaphor for representing sub-optimal architectural solutions that might cause an interest, in terms of effort or quality, to be paid by the organization in the long run. Such metaphor has been regarded as useful for communicating risks of suboptimal solutions between technical and non-technical stakeholders. However, it's fundamental to understand the information needs of the involved stakeholders in order to produce technical debt measurements that would allow proper communication and informed prioritization. We have investigated, through a combination of interviews, observations and a survey, what key information is needed by agile product owners and software architects in order to prioritize the refactoring of risky architectural technical debt items with respect to feature development.