Industry TrackTechDebt 2026

Call for Contributions

The International Conference on Technical Debt 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, and 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 Justine Gehring (Gologic, justine.gehring@gologic.com) and Dr. Rodrigo Spinola (Virginia Commonwealth University, spinolaro@vcu.edu).

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 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.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline for talks: January 16, 2026
• Notification for talks: January 30, 2026
• Conference: April 12-13, 2026

Why Submit to Industry Track at TechDebt?

• Connect with fellow practitioners who face the challenges of Technical Debt in their daily work.
• Exchange ideas with leading researchers who are presenting innovative solutions and fresh approaches to managing Technical Debt.