The First International Conference on Technical Debt will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, on May 27-28, 2018 collocated with ICSE 2018.

Technical debt is a metaphor that software developers and managers increasingly use to communicate key tradeoffs related to release and quality issues. The Managing Technical Debt workshop series had, since 2010, brought together practitioners and researchers to discuss and define issues related to technical debt and how they can be studied. Workshop participants reiterated the usefulness of the concept each year, shared emerging practices used in software development organizations, and emphasized the need for more research and better means for sharing emerging practices and results.

As the interest from our industry and academic researchers in Technical Debt has steadily grown, the workshop series has morphed into a full conference in 2018. Our goal for this conference on Technical Debt is to bring together leading software engineering researchers and practitioners for the purpose of exploring theoretical and practical techniques for managing technical debt.

Topics of interest

The following topics are aligned with the conference theme:

• Identification of technical debt
• Visualization of technical debt
• Analysis of technical debt
• Metrics for technical debt
• Economic models for describing or reasoning about technical debt
• Understanding causes and effects of technical debt
• Relationship of technical debt to software evolution, maintenance, and aging
• Relationship of technical debt with other activities, such as testing or requirement elicitation
• The business case for technical debt management
• Technical debt and software life-cycle management
• Technical debt within a software ecosystem
• Technical debt in designs and architecture
• Technical debt in software models
• Techniques and tools for calculating technical debt principal and interest
• Concrete practices and tools used to measure and control technical debt
• Education related to technical debt