Second international workshop on managing technical debt: (MTD 2011)

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the software development community as a way to understand and communicate issues of intrinsic quality, value, and cost. 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 trade-offs based on models of their economic impacts. The goal of this second workshop is to discuss managing technical debt as a part of the research agenda for the software engineering field.