A systematic literature review of technical debt prioritization

Repaying all technical debt (TD) present in a system may be unfeasible, as there is typically a shortage in the resources allocated for TD repayment. Therefore, TD prioritization is essential to best allocate such resources to determine which TD items are to be repaid first and which items are to be delayed until later releases. This study conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify and analyze the currently researched TD prioritization approaches. The employed search strategy strove to achieve high completeness through the identification of a quasi-gold standard set, which was used to establish a search string to automatically retrieve papers from select research databases. The application of selection criteria, along with forward and backward snowballing, identified 24 TD prioritization approaches. The analysis of the identified approaches revealed a scarcity of approaches that account for cost, value, and resources constraint and a lack of industry evaluation. Furthermore, this SLR unveils potential gaps in the current TD prioritization research, which future research may explore.