A Lean Approach of Managing Technical Debt in Agile Software Projects – A Proposal and Empirical Evaluation

Abstract Technical Debt Management (TDM) includes activities such as identifying, measuring, and prioritizing technical debt. It is mainly performed to proactively mitigate the risk of losing maintainability evolvability software product which results in reducing team velocity. Despite importance TDM, its adoption companies remain limited. Software are witnessing high market demand competition that make delivering customer value outweighs effort invested TDM activities. Since impacts debt uncertain evident only long run, it more difficult for with very limited resources spend their on TDM. In this paper, we propose a lean approach facilitate resources. Based approach, driven by project management metrics, or sprint velocity, velocity variance. We conducted an initial evaluation concept through short survey 43 project/product managers. Most respondents have positive impression about our will encourage us proceed further using robust empirical evaluation.