Technical debt is a metaphor used to refer to deficiencies in the design or implementation of software caused by prioritizing feature development over fixing existing issues. Like its financial counterpart, technical debt has a principal as well as an interest, the latter of which tends to aggregate and grow over time. Efforts to control technical debt have resulted in several models and well-known tools that can be of help to developers, QA people and management.

In this talk we show some of the most well-known models, we explore how existing tools can help manage technical debt, discuss their limitations, and showcase the results of our research regarding the long-term behavior and characteristics of debt in several open-source applications.