In Search of a Metric for Managing Architectural Technical Debt

Practices designed to expedite the delivery of stakeholder value can paradoxically lead to unexpected rework costs that ultimately degrade the flow of value over time. This is especially observable when features are developed based on immediate value, while dependencies that may slow down future development efforts are neglected. The technical debt metaphor conceptualizes this tradeoff between short-term and long-term value: taking shortcuts to optimize the delivery of features in the short term incurs debt, analogous to financial debt, that must be paid off later to optimize long-term success. In this paper, we describe taking an architecture-focused and measurement-based approach to develop a metric that assists in strategically managing technical debt. Such an approach can be used to optimize the cost of development over time while continuing to deliver value to the customer. We demonstrate our approach by describing its application to an ongoing system development effort.