Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization: An Industrial Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a business-driven approach for prioritizing technical debt, evaluated through a five-month industrial case study, demonstrating improved alignment with business goals and reduction of high-value technical debt.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that incorporates business criteria into technical debt prioritization, validated in an industrial setting with active stakeholder participation.

Findings

Aligned business and technical stakeholder criteria.

Observed reduction in high-value technical debt.

Identified eight business factors influencing prioritization.

Abstract

Incorporating the business perspective into prioritizing technical debt is essential to contribute to decision making in industry. In this paper, we evolve and evaluate a business-driven approach for technical debt prioritization. The approach was evaluated during a five-month industrial case study with business and technical stakeholders' active participation. The results show that the approach contributed to aligning business criteria between the business and technical stakeholders. We also observed a downward trend in the amount of technical debt that affects high-value business assets. Moreover, we identified eight business factors that affect the decision making related to the prioritization of technical debt. The study results suggest that the proposed business-driven technical debt prioritization approach can help teams to focus their efforts on paying off the business' most relevant debt.