Stakeholder Criteria in Technical Debt Decision-Making: A Practitioner-Informed Taxonomy (opens in new tab)

Technical Debt (TD) decisions are rarely just technical. Stakeholders consider heterogeneous criteria, such as deadlines, client expectations, architectural consequences, available resources, organizational authority, and team sustainability, when deciding whether to acquire, postpone, prioritize, or repay TD. However, these criteria are often reported under different labels and at different levels of abstraction, making it difficult to compare ...