Adjusting the Balance Sheet by Appending Technical Debt

Technical debt is a metaphor in software engineering interpreted as a trade-off between short-term benefits of postponing development activities and long-term consequences of postponing those activities. Most of the research in technical debt literature focus on identifying technical debt, justifying what to include and what to exclude in the technical debt scope and how to deal with them: either to defer the development activity or to avoid debt. However, there are only a few studies which considered technical debt as a financial obligation. In this paper, we propose to record technical debt item in the balance sheet as a kind of liability. We also review the effect of having technical debt liabilities in the balance sheet.