Towards the Use of a Framework to Make Technical Debt Visible

Technical debt concept has been in use since the 90s's decade. Several processes, techniques and tools, such as those related with software maintenance and risk control, are used to manage, prevent, measure and reduce technical debt. Technical debt management includes activities to identify, measure, prioritize, repay, and monitor it, but one of the main issues related with management resides in the complexity to make technical debt visible to organizations. In this paper is presented the application of the Normative Process Framework to make technical debt visible with a large system developed by students of software engineering. The Normative Process Framework is used in conjunction with a process to find technical debt and document it in a simple format. Results show how technical debt was made visible for that system in a simplified way, by using documentation generated during development, and considering not only code, but also other software assets. Once technical debt is made visible is easier to evaluate and prioritize it, to establish a convenient set of actions to control it.