The financial aspect of managing technical debt: A systematic literature review

Context: Technical debt is a software engineering metaphor, referring to the eventual financial consequences of trade-offs between shrinking product time to market and poorly specifying, or implementing a software product, throughout all development phases. Based on its inter-disciplinary nature, i.e. software engineering and economics, research on managing technical debt should be balanced between software engineering and economic theories. Objective: The aim of this study is to analyze research efforts on technical debt, by focusing on their financial aspect. Specifically, the analysis is carried out with respect to: (a) how financial aspects are defined in the context of technical debt and (b) how they relate to the underlying software engineering