Software Engineering Institute

This information sheet describes the Third Annual Managing Technical Debt Workshop. Technical debt refers to the degraded quality and required rework resulting from short-term decisions made to expedite software development and delivery. Once developers incur this debt, they become subject to "interest" charges in the form of higher long-term rework costs as time passes; customer requirements evolve; and intervening versions, perhaps carrying their own technical debt, are released. Today's larger, more complex, and more interdependent systems only exacerbate the consequences of technical debt and demand more urgent efforts to address it. The goal of this fourth workshop is to focus on theoretical foundations and empirical evidence for analyzing and optimizing short-term versus long-term goals in large-scale projects. The program will also stress the importance of offering software engineers a foundation for managing such tradeoffs based on models of their economic impacts.