A Financial Approach for Managing Interest in Technical Debt

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor that is used by both technical and management stakeholders to acknowledge and discuss issues related to compromised design-time qualities. Until now, despite the inherent relevance of technical debt to economics, the TD community has not sufficiently exploited economic methods/models. In this paper we present a framework for managing interest in technical debt, founded on top of Liquidity Preference, a well-known economics theory. To tailor this theory to fit the TD context, we exploit the synthesized knowledge as presented in two recent studies. Specifically, in our framework, we discuss aspects related to technical debt interest, such as: types of TD interest, TD interest characteristics, and a proposed TD interest theory. Finally, to boost the amount of empirical studies in TD research, we propose several tentative research designs that could be used for exploring the notion of interest in technical debt practice.