Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review
Journal article, 2020
Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review of 557 unique papers published until 2019, following a consolidated methodology applied in software engineering. We included 44 primary studies.
Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and proposing optimization regarding different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We present an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools.
Conclusion. We observed that Technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what the important factors are and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive. In this paper, we therefore outline different directions for necessary future investigations.
Technical Debt
Systematic Literature Review
Technical Debt Prioritization
Author
Valentina Lenarduzzi
Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT)
Terese Besker
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)
Davide Taibi
University of Tampere
Antonio Martini
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)
Francesca Arcelli Fontana
University of Milano-Bicocca
Journal of Systems and Software
0164-1212 (ISSN)
Vol. 171 110827Subject Categories
Embedded Systems
Computer Science
Computer Systems
DOI
10.1016/j.jss.2020.110827