Technical Debt: The Current Understanding for the Barrier to Evolve Software

Abstract

Technical debt refers to the adoption of suboptimal solutions in software development in order to prioritize development costs, and is known as one of the barrier factors that hinder software evolution. A new aspect in technical debt is that not all of the debts are regarded as negative effects to be resolved, but rather certain debts are accepted and managed to prevent them from becoming negative effects. This paper provides an overview of technical debt and related technologies, and explains how technical debt relates to previous technologies related to design and code quality.