A portfolio approach to technical debt management

Authors:
Yuepu Guo;Carolyn Seaman
Affiliations:
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA;University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Managing Technical Debt
Year:
2011

Citing 1
Cited 3

The WyCash portfolio management system

OOPSLA '92 Addendum to the proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications (Addendum)

An exploration of technical debt

Journal of Systems and Software
Technical debt: towards a crisper definition report on the 4th international workshop on managing technical debt

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Design capital and design moves: the logic of digital business strategy

MIS Quarterly

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Technical debt describes the effect of immature software artifacts on software maintenance - the potential of extra effort required in future as if paying interest for the incurred debt. The uncertainty of interest payment further complicates the problem of what debt should be incurred or repaid and when. To help software managers make informed decisions, a portfolio approach is proposed in this paper. The approach leverages the portfolio management theory in the finance domain to determine the optimal collection of technical debt items that should be incurred or held. We expect this approach could provide a new perspective for technical debt management.