# Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a business-driven framework called Tracy for prioritizing technical debt, aiming to improve alignment and communication between technical teams and business stakeholders.

## Contribution

It develops and validates a novel framework that aligns technical debt prioritization with business goals, addressing misalignment issues.

## Key findings

- Improved stakeholder communication and alignment.
- Effective prioritization of technical debt based on business impact.
- Validated through multi-case study and design science research.

## Abstract

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 that there is a misalignment between the prioritization done by technical professionals and the prioritization expected by business ones. This paper presents a business-driven approach to prioritize technical debt items. The research is organized into four phases: exploratory, to identify the research focus; concept verification, where the proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-case study; solution, where a design science research was conducted to develop Tracy, a framework for technical debt prioritization; and validation. Results so far show that the business-driven prioritization of technical debt items can improve the alignment and communication between the technical and business stakeholders.