Design Debt Prioritization – A Design Best Practice-Based Approach

Technical debt (TD) in a software system is a metaphor that tries to illustrate the remediation effort of the already introduced quality deficit and the impact thereof to the business value of the system. To address TD, various management activities are proposed, each addressing a particular purpose. Whereas the activities of debt identification and measurement are broadly considered in literature, the activities of debt prioritization and communication lack appropriate approaches with an economic perspective. This work proposes a TD prioritization approach. Therefore, it narrows down the focus of TD to design debt and relies on the quantification of design best practices. Further, the non-conformance of these practices is assessed by applying a benchmarking technique. As a result, the gained information is transferred into a portfolio-matrix to support the prioritization and communication of design remediation actions. The applicability and suitability of the approach are demonstrated by using the source code of the open source project GeoGebra.