Towards an Ontology of Terms on Technical Debt

Technical debt is a term that has been used to describe the increased cost of changing or maintaining a system due to shortcuts taken during its development. As technical debt is a recent research area, its different types and their indicators are not organized yet. Therefore, this paper proposes an ontology of terms on technical debt in order to organize a common vocabulary for the area. The organized concepts derived from the results of a systematic literature mapping. The proposed ontology was evaluated in two steps. In the first one, some ontology design quality criteria were used. For the second one, a specialist in the area performed an initial evaluation. This work contributes to evolve the Technical Debt Landscape through the organization of the different types of technical debt and their indicators. We consider this an important contribution for both researchers and practitioners because this information was spread out in the literature hindering their use in research and development activities.