Managing technical debt in practice: An industrial report

The Technical Debt (TD) metaphor has been used as a way to manage and communicate long-term consequences that some decisions may cause. However the state of the art in TD has not culminated yet in rigorous analysis models for large-scale projects. This work analyses an industrial project, from the perspective of its decisions and related events, so that we can better characterize the existence of TD and show the evolution of its parameters. The project in study had a life cycle of six years (2005-2011) and its data for analysis was collected from emails, documents, CVS logs, code files and interviews with developers and project managers. From this analysis, we identified the factors that had influence on the project decisions and their impact on the system along the time. Furthermore, we were able to extract a set of lessons associated with the characterization of TD in projects of this port.