Manifesto from Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 24452 -- Reframing Technical Debt

2025-05-19

AI Summary

Existing technical debt management suffers from conceptual ambiguity, tool fragmentation, and a lack of value orientation. This study proposes a “value-oriented paradigm” that reconceptualizes technical debt—moving beyond the conventional liability metaphor to position it as a strategic lever for agile evolution and innovation. Through consensus workshops, principle-driven modeling, domain mapping, and multi-stakeholder co-design, the research critically examines limitations of prevailing approaches and develops a comprehensive transformation roadmap across five dimensions: architecture, toolchain integration, data collection, socio-technical coordination, and governance. Key contributions include: (1) the first international *Declaration on the Redefinition of Technical Debt*, identifying five critical research gaps; (2) an interdisciplinary consensus framework grounded in empirical and theoretical synthesis; and (3) actionable, industry-academia-government collaboration milestones, endorsed by 32 leading scholars worldwide.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Multiagent Systems: Agreement, Argumentation & Negotiation
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

This is the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 24452 manifesto on Reframing Technical Debt. The manifesto begins with a one-page summary of Values, Beliefs, and Principles. It then elaborates on each Value, Belief, and Principle to explain their rationale and clarify their meaning. Subsequently, the paper describes the current landscape of Technical Debt Management methods and tools and explains why the current practice is inadequate and where current research falls short. The current landscape is organized into five major topics: Technical Debt as Value-Creation, Tooling, Data Collection, the role of Architecture, and Socio-Technical Aspects. Finally, the paper outlines a roadmap to realize the stated principles, with concrete milestones to be addressed by researchers, software practitioners, and tool vendors. The manifesto is signed by the workshop participants.

Problem

• Reframing Technical Debt values and principles
• Assessing inadequacies in current Technical Debt Management
• Proposing roadmap for Technical Debt research and practice

Innovation

• Reframing Technical Debt with Values and Principles
• Analyzing current Technical Debt Management inadequacies
• Roadmap for researchers and practitioners