Software Engineering Institute

Technical debt is a metaphor that conceptualizes the tradeoff between short-term and long-term value. Managing technical debt is an increasingly critical aspect of producing cost-effective, timely, and high-quality software products.

Summary of Findings

• Design areas with a greater density of technical debt provide significant opportunities for improvement.
• The issues we find are mostly the result of unintentional design choices.
• Correlations between vulnerabilities and technical debt indicators warrant further research that combines multiple artifacts in analysis.
• Technical debt can be made visible earlier when tracked similarly to defects, consequently managed more effectively and strategically.