In this just-released white paper, Dr. Bill Curtis – SVP and Chief Scientist at CAST – examines the Technical Debt metaphor to explain how it can be used to help executives think about software quality in business terms while governing software changeability and maintainability of their application portfolios.

For those with responsibility to govern the costs and risks of application portfolios, the financial metaphor “Technical Debt” helps us think about software quality in business terms. This paper includes a formula to benchmark your Technical Debt against industry data, or adjust the parameters to best fit your organization’s own maintenance and structural quality objectives, experiences, and costs. It also details the “Technical Debt Management Cycle” for analyzing and measuring Technical Debt so you can relate executive business priorities to strategic quality priorities for reducing business risk and IT cost.