Decision criteria for the payment of technical debt in software projects: A systematic mapping study

The term Technical Debt (TD) is used to describe the debt that a development team incurs when it takes shortcuts in the software development process, but that may increase the complexity and maintenance cost in the long-term. If a development team does not manage TD, this debt can cause significant long-term problems such as high maintenance costs. An important goal of the management of the debt is to evaluate the appropriate time to pay a TD item and to effectively apply decision-making criteria to balance the shortterm benefits against long-term costs. However, although there are different studies that have proposed strategies for the management of TD, decision criteria are often discussed in the background and, sometimes, they are not even mentioned. Thus, the purpose of this work is to identify, by performing a systematic mapping study of the literature, decision-making criteria that have been proposed to support the management of TD.