A proposed Approach for Managing Technical Debt in Software Projects

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor for technical problems that are hidden from customers and end users but hinder development efforts during system evolution and future improvements. TD is frequently incurred due to tight budgets and timelines, which lead to financial, quality, and technical issues that make future maintenance more costly or impossible. Project management concentrates on external issues related to customer satisfaction and does not concentrate on system internal software quality defects and maintenance that be subject to future interest payments. In this paper, we highlight and investigate, in detail, an overview of the Technical Debt items for the software development team in SMEs. In addition, we present a TD management (TDM) approach with best practices for each step, provided with studied cases for applying the TDM approach at software industrial companies. The study shows that the proposed approach to measuring the impact of internal / external software quality leads to increased awareness of TD’s occurrence and provides processes to identify, prevent, monitor, prioritize, and repay TD to satisfy both software technical requirements and customer value and halt project failures and overruns. The analysis of applying our TDM approach leads to a better comprehension of TD contraction in selected software companies, improvements in team morale and motivation, and an increase in its maintainability.