# Tracy: A Business-driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework

## TL;DR

Tracy is a framework that helps software teams prioritize technical debt based on business impact, integrating business processes to improve decision-making.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel business-driven approach for technical debt prioritization, developed through participatory research with industry professionals.

## Key findings

- Framework is coherent and structured
- Supports business-driven decision making
- Initial evaluation shows promising results

## Abstract

Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different groups of three companies. The initial evaluation shows that the presented framework is coherent in its structure and that its results contribute to business-driven decision making on technical debt prioritization.