Practical considerations, challenges, and requirements of tool-support for managing technical debt

Developing a software product with a high level of quality that also meets budget and schedule is the main goal of any organization. This usually implies making tradeoffs among conflicting aspects like number of features to implement, user perceived quality, time-to-market, and the ability of the company to maintain and improve the system in a feasible way in the future (aka, managing Technical Debt (TD)). In this paper we present a fresh perspective on TD from a CMMI Maturity Level 5 company. Examples, practical considerations, and challenges in dealing with TD are presented along with ten requirements of a tool for managing TD.