Organizing the State of Practice on Technical Debt Prevention, Monitoring, and Payment in Software Projects

Context: Technical debt (TD) prevention, monitoring, and payment activities allow software teams to prevent potential TD items, follow their evolution, and eliminate them, respectively. Knowing the state of practice of these activities can help development teams to choose the best practice to be used in their projects and understand which aspects need to be improved to enable TD management. Aims: To investigate and organize the state of practice on the prevention, monitoring, and payment of TD items in software projects. Method: We conduct a literature review on these activities and analyze data collected during the InsighTD Project. It is a globally distributed family of industrial surveys on TD. We organize the body of knowledge in conceptual maps and IDEA (Impediments, Decision factors, Enabling practices, and Actions) diagrams and assess them through case studies. Results: We identify a set of practices used to prevent, monitor, and pay TD items and a set of practice avoidance reasons (PARs) that justify the non-application of these practices. We organize practices and PARs along with their types, natures, and categories into maps and IDEA diagrams. From the assessment of those artifacts, we found out that they can support TD prevention, monitoring, and payment activities. Conclusion: As a benchmark, maps can reveal new practices that teams can use in their projects, while IDEA diagrams can assist teams in increasing their ability to manage TD items in their projects