Identifying Architectural Technical Debt: Moving Forward

In software-intensive systems, technical debt is a metaphor encompassing design and implementation constructs that are used as expedients in the short term, but that hinder future maintainability and evolvability. Architectural technical debt, in turn, adopts such concept by considering sub-optimal architectural design and implementation choices that bring short-term benefits to the cost of the long-term gradual deterioration of the quality of the software architecture. Architectural technical debt is an active field of research. Nevertheless, how to accurately identify and manage architectural technical debt is still an open question. Our research aims to fill this gap. In particular, our goal is to: (i) consolidate the existing knowledge of architectural technical debt identification and its management in practice, (ii) conceive novel identification and management approaches built upon the existing state of the art techniques and industrial needs, and (iii) provide empirical evidence of architectural technical debt phenomena and assess the viability of the conceived approaches. As a result, we envision a sound methodology aimed to support software architects in the identification and management of architectural technical debt throughout the software development process.