Towards a model for optimizing technical debt in software products

There is a growing interest in applying the technical debt metaphor to investigate issues related to the tradeoff of the likely long-term costs associated with software design shortcuts for expected short-term business benefits in terms of increased earlier functionality. We propose an optimization model that contrasts the patterns of technical debt accumulation in a software product with the patterns of consumer adoption of the product throughout its evolution. This facilitates a rigorous and balanced analysis of the pros and cons of accumulating technical debt at various lifecycle stages of a software product. We discuss the use of the optimization model to derive policies for managing technical debt and the potential for empirical tests of the model and other future interdisciplinary research.