Manifesto from Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 24452 -- Reframing Technical Debt
Paris Avgeriou, Ipek Ozkaya, Heiko Koziolek, Zadia Codabux, Neil Ernst
TL;DR
The manifesto reframes Technical Debt management as a comprehensive, cross-cutting software engineering practice that extends beyond code quality to include architecture, data collection, and socio-technical factors. It presents a values-beliefs-principles framework intended to guide practice, research, and tooling, and surveys the current landscape to identify gaps in value assessment, tooling, data fusion, architectural practices, and human factors. A five-phase roadmap is proposed to disseminate the principles, translate them into practice, validate new processes and tools, institutionalize the approach, and pursue continuous improvement, with concrete milestones, benchmarks, and collaborations. The paper aims to shift both industry and academia toward proactive, automated yet human-in-the-loop, architecture-aware TD management, supported by standardized benchmarks, integrated toolchains, and governance structures such as Architecture Decision Records and TD champions. Collectively, these contributions offer a path to more transparent, context-aware, and value-driven management of Technical Debt that aligns engineering practice with business goals and organizational culture.
Abstract
This is the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 24452 manifesto on Reframing Technical Debt. The manifesto begins with a one-page summary of Values, Beliefs, and Principles. It then elaborates on each Value, Belief, and Principle to explain their rationale and clarify their meaning. Subsequently, the paper describes the current landscape of Technical Debt Management methods and tools and explains why the current practice is inadequate and where current research falls short. The current landscape is organized into five major topics: Technical Debt as Value-Creation, Tooling, Data Collection, the role of Architecture, and Socio-Technical Aspects. Finally, the paper outlines a roadmap to realize the stated principles, with concrete milestones to be addressed by researchers, software practitioners, and tool vendors. The manifesto is signed by the workshop participants.