Foreword

The Third International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt, MTD 2012, was this year co-located with the 34rd International Conference on Software Engineering at Zurich, Switzerland. This is the second year that we are holding this workshop co-located with ICSE. The technical debt metaphor has gained significant traction in the software development community as a way to understand and communicate issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost in the past few years. The idea is that developers sometimes accept compromises in a system in one dimension (e.g., modularity) to meet an urgent demand in some other dimension (e.g., a deadline), and that such compromises incur a "debt:" on which "interest" has to be paid and which should be repaid at some point for the long-term health of the project. Little is known about technical debt, beyond feelings and opinions. The software engineering research community has an opportunity to study this phenomenon and improve the way it is handled. We can offer software engineers a foundation for managing such tradeoffs based on models of their economic impacts. The software engineering community is in the process of building the research agenda around managing technical debt. The purpose of these initial workshops is to bring forward work in progress and ideas from the entire community to collectively vet their validity for the future. In order to support this goal, submissions were open to the members of the program committee as well as the organizing committee. Following a conflict of interest policy, the papers were selected after a peer review by at least three members of the program committee. For this third workshop we accepted 7 full research and 4 short position papers. The accepted submissions cover a range of topics such as: estimating the size and cost of debt, eliciting and visualizing debt, the technical debt landscape ranging from technical debt in software ecosystems to requirements, design and build, and the relationshi- between code defects and debt. Managing technical debt is a broad concern of software engineering that blends research and practice. This can be seen from the program and those involved in the workshop program selection process. To encourage interactive discussion, foster brainstorming and community building the workshop will consist of only short presentations from the accepted papers. These short presentations will provide a basis for the participants to investigate further open research questions and challenges in practice. It is for that purpose the program includes sessions dedicated to open discussion.