Identifying technical debt cost factors in reflection activities of an agile projects

The technical debt metaphor has received wide attention by both practitioners and researchers alike. The metaphor has been proven useful to explain in economy´s terms aspects which occur during the software development process. This work studies the applicability of the metaphor in reflection activities of agile projects. To achieve this, a qualitative research methodology has been carried out to study the records of a live agile development projects. Our results confirm the applicably of the proposal by the identification of terms related to the metaphor in this records. Moreover, our study has further validated the applicability of cost factors used in technical debt measurement reported in the literature.