A Practical Guide to Establishing Technical Debt Management
Marion Wiese
TL;DR
The paper offers a practical, team-focused framework for establishing technical debt management, derived from industry collaborations and distilled into actionable guidance. It defines TD, catalogs debt types, and presents a cause-and-consequence model, complemented by a concrete process: appoint a TD Manager, adjust tooling and templates, detect TD via indicators and static analysis, prioritize with Educated Guess, Mean Value, or ROI, and manage repayment with visualization in the backlog. A robust set of best practices (versus nice-to-haves), concrete getting-started steps, and strategies to avoid common pitfalls are provided, along with an approach to scale from team-level adoption to company-wide rollout via top-down or community-of-practice pathways. The framework emphasizes practical measurement, visualization, and governance to improve maintainability and evolvability, with a calculable ROI flavor presented through $ROI_{months} = \frac{\text{effort (PD)}}{\text{interest burden (PD/month)}}$. Overall, it offers a structured, adaptable blueprint for teams to manage TD and provides a path for broader organizational scaling while acknowledging potential challenges and missteps.
Abstract
This white paper provides an overview of the topic of "technical debt" and presents an approach for managing technical debt in teams. The white paper is based on the results of my dissertation, which aimed to translate scientific findings into practical guidance. To this end, I collaborated with other researchers to support three teams from different companies in adapting and establishing a technical debt management system tailored to their specific needs. Research findings were supplemented with details or additional approaches. Research results that were less practical were discarded. The result is a guide on establishing technical debt management within a team. The guide is intended to provide orientation and not be a rigid framework. We distinguish between "best practices" and "nice-to-haves." "Best practices" are understood to be all approaches that were adopted by all three teams. "Nice-to-haves" were used by at least one team. In many places, it is explicitly mentioned that the team should decide together how to design the process. This also applies, of course, to all areas where this was not explicitly mentioned. This white paper explicitly does not cover the establishment of technical debt management across the entire company, but provides suggestions for this at the end.