Technical debt aggregation in ecosystems

The members of the ecosystem encompassing our organization are affected by our decisions just as we are affected by their decisions. If an organization takes on technical debt with respect to a specific asset, that decision will affect users of the asset either directly or indirectly. In this position paper we distinguish between incurring technical debt directly and experiencing the effects of technical debt indirectly. We illustrate why two separate concepts are needed for a complete theory and provide examples from ecosystem models we have created for several organizations. The result is a model that produces good explanations for posited scenarios.