The Quest for Introducing Technical Debt Management in a Large-Scale Industrial Company

The long lifetime and the evolving nature of industrial products make them subject to technical debt management at different levels such as architecture and code. Although the classical steps to perform technical debt management are known, in a study that we have been performing in a large-scale industrial company as our client, we realized that finding a starting point, which leads to the desired outcome, is in fact a major challenge. This paper elaborates on various causes that we have identified for this challenge, and discusses our stepwise approach to address them so that the software quality can be improved. We believe that our experiences can be beneficial for both practitioners and researchers to gain more insight into applying quality improvement in practice as well as indicating open areas for further research.