Tracy: A Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework

Abstract

Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different groups of three companies. The initial evaluation shows that the presented framework is coherent in its structure and that its results contribute to business-driven decision making on technical debt prioritization.

Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization

“…4) Validation: the next step towards the end of the research is the application of Technical Action Research [8] to validate if the solution meets the design requirements. We executed an initial evaluation which shows that the developed framework is coherent in its structure, but more cases must be executed to make the evidence stronger [6].…”

“…Using our previous approach [5], we developed the Tracy Framework [6] -a business-driven framework that prioritizes technical debt. To prioritize technical debt, Tracy considers how IT assets (configuration items, e.g., systems or services, that create business value) support company's business processes.…”

“…The results so far show that: (i) the proposed businessdriven approach to prioritize technical debt can be useful to support the prioritization of technical debt [5]; (ii) that the Tracy Framework allows technical and business stakeholders to align their expectations of the technical debt prioritization, through a standard set of business metrics and a common view of the business processes [6]. Next steps include more effort on the validation phase by evolving and applying our results in more scenarios and companies.…”

Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality -- A Quantitative Study of 39 Proprietary Production Codebases

“…More recent work, i.e., published after Ampatzoglou et al's review [3], includes work by de Almeida and colleagues and Besker et al Almeida et al developed Tracy, a "business-oriented decisionmaking framework to promote the alignment between technical decisions and business expectations" [18]. The development followed the design science research paradigm and involved 49 professionals from three companies.…”

Priorização de Dívidas Técnicas Orientada a Negócios com Tracy-TD: Estudo de caso na empresa COMEIA

“…Rebouc ¸as et al [Rebouc ¸as de Almeida et al 2019] apresenta uma abordagem intitulada "Tracy" que considera a perspectiva do negócio para priorizar as dívidas técnicas. Esta abordagem permite que diferentes stakeholders, tanto da área de negócios quanto das áreas técnicas se envolvam no processo e é suportado por uma ferramenta chamada "Tracy-TD 1 ".…”