Technical debt describes a universal software development phenomenon: design or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term but set up a technical context that can make future changes more costly or impossible. Software developers and managers increasingly use the concept to communicate key tradeoffs related to release and quality issues. The goal of this two-day conference is to bring together leading software researchers, practitioners, and tool vendors to explore theoretical and practical techniques that manage technical debt.

The Managing Technical Debt workshop series has provided a forum since 2010 for practitioners and researchers to discuss issues related to technical debt and share emerging practices used in software-development organizations. A week-long Dagstuhl Seminar on Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering has produced a consensus definition for technical debt, a draft conceptual model, and a research roadmap.