Agile Technical Debt Management usingthe LTD Framework

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.