DebtFlag: Technical debt management with a development environment integrated tool

In this paper, we introduce the DebtFlag tool for capturing, tracking and resolving technical debt in software projects. DebtFlag integrates into the development environment and provides developers with lightweight documentation tools to capture technical debt and link them to corresponding parts in the implementation. During continued development these links are used to create propagation paths for the documented debt. This allows for an up-to-date and accurate presentation of technical debt to be upheld, which enables developer conducted implementation-level micromanagement as well as higher level technical debt management.