A framework for managing interest in technical debt

Technical debt management entails the quantification of principal and interest. In our previous work we had introduced a framework for calculating the Technical Debt Breaking Point (TD-BP), which is a point in time where the accumulated interest becomes larger than the principal; thus the debt of the company is no longer sustainable after this point in time. In this paper, we instantiate this framework and validate its ability to assess the breaking point of source code modules in an industrial setting. The results of the validation suggest that the calculated TD-BP is strongly correlated to experts’ opinion on the sustainability of modules, and that it can accurately rank components, based on their maintenance difficulty.