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Agile Technical Debt Management using the LTD Framework

Published: 27 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The Technical Debt (TD) metaphor refers to the unavoidable maintenance and evolution costs of the notquite- right decisions commonly taken by software developers. Due to its clear importance, developers usually document and manage TD by adopting ad-hoc and informal artifacts and activities. Thus, in this paper, we first propose a lightweight framework to support agile teams to manage and increase the awareness on TD. This framework, called LTD: Less Technical Debt Framework, has four key activities-TD Consensus, TD Discovery, TD Planning, and TD Payment-that can be easily plugged into current agile methodologies, such as Scrum. To assess the applicability of LTD in a real context, we also conduct a case study with two Scrum teams from a large public company. As a result, we achieved promising outcomes after adopting the framework. For example, the teams could reduce TD by creating a backlog of issues to pay during sprints.

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cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 49, Issue 1
January 2024
34 pages
DOI:10.1145/3635439
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 27 December 2023
Published in SIGSOFT Volume 49, Issue 1

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