Industry TrackTechDebt 2025

Accepted Papers

Call for Contributions

The International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt) is the premier venue for researchers and practitioners to discuss approaches for managing various types of Technical Debt, to share experiences and best practices. TechDebt’s Industry Track fosters a deep exchange between academia, industry and non-commercial organizations by inviting practitioners to share their experiences with other practitioners and the research community. Hence, the track strongly focuses on real-word experiences made by practitioners. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Problems caused by Technical Debt.
• Approaches that helped to deal with Technical Debt.
• Approaches that failed at dealing with Technical Debt.
• Experiences with tools that help to deal with Technical Debt.

Specific examples include:

• The relationship between quality assurance activities and Technical Debt management
• Use of artificial intelligence approaches to support Technical Debt Management
• Social and team factors on Technical Debt
• Interplay between Software Economics and Technical Debt
• How Technical Debt is identified, tracked, andq monitored
• What (un)successful debt management looks like
• How the “principal” and “interest” of Technical Debt is or should be measured
• Stakeholders’ concerns on Technical Debt (e.g., convincing stakeholders to support taking action on technical debt)
• Data on what works to pay down and effectively manage Technical Debt
• How debt items should be prioritized vs other concerns (like developing new features)
• Less studied kinds of Technical Debt: e.g., Requirement, Test, Documentation, Infrastructure, Security Debt
• Technical Debt in the context of other topics (e.g., DevOps, Machine Learning, etc.)

We encourage the submission of reports of both successes and failures as these are of high value for practitioners and researchers. For questions or comments, please reach out to Drs. Reed Milewicz (Sandia National Laboratories, rmilewi@sandia.gov) and Fatemeh Fard (University of British Columbia, fatemeh.fard@ubc.ca).

Talk Submissions

Please submit an abstract of your presentation describing what you plan to talk about. Presenters are expected to attend in-person to give their talk and to benefit from discussions with other industry and academic participants.

Presentation time will depend on the number of accepted submissions but is expected to be 20 to 30 minutes.

How to submit: Please use this Google form to submit your contribution.

The track chairs will review the abstracts based on the relevance of the presentation topic to the conference and the potential for the presentation to stimulate discussion and debate and/or to generate new and innovative ideas.

Want To Contribute But Can’t Attend?

While talk submissions require in-person attendance, we recognize that many in industry are unable to travel, but this conference would still benefit immensely from your thoughts. For this reason, we invite industry practitioners to contribute Technical Debt War Stories. We invite practitioners to provide:

• Stories of triumphs and failures
• Instructive examples with lessons learned
• Hard-won wisdom and informed opinions
• Diverse perspectives on the good and the bad when it comes to Technical Debt

Accepted stories will be shared with conference participants and used to inform discussions among researchers and practitioners. Participants may submit stories anonymously, but otherwise will receive recognition for contributing on the conference website. Stories will be anonymized to remove specific company names and personally identifiable information. Submission indicates that the conference organizers have permission to use the content during the conference to inspire discussion.

How to submit: Please use this Google form to submit your contribution.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline for talks: February 15, 2025
• Notification for talks: February 28, 2025
• Submission deadline for war stories: April 1st, 2025
• Conference: April 27th-28th, 2025

Why Submit to Industry Track at TechDebt?

• At TechDebt you meet other practitioners that have to deal with Technical Debt every day.
• At TechDebt you meet researchers that present new and innovative approaches to tackle Technical Debt.