A Plea to Tool Vendors: Do Not Mislead How Technical Debt Is Managed

All systems have technical debt, and it has to be continuously managed. Thanks to the past decade of research, software engineering teams have now built an awareness and understanding of technical debt as a concept,1 have an improved appreciation of code analysis to drive down unintentional implementation mistakes that may lead to technical debt,2 and even started using some practices to improve its management.3 In fact, arguably, the managing technical debt research agenda, which was initially summarized at the 2010 National Science Foundation Future of Software Engineering Workshop,4 has been one of the few bodies of work in software engineering where we have seen upfront and engaged collaboration among academia, industry, and tool vendors.