Infinite technical debt

Code ridden with Technical Debt (TD) has motivated software engineers to keep the quality of systems under control to ease future maintenance tasks. In the last decade, there have been significant advances regarding TD management (TDM). However, research about incorporating TDM into the software development lifecycle remains scarce, and existing approaches aim to control TD through different processes. This proposal leverages the concept of infinite games from game theory to posit a different perspective. We argue that TD cannot be entirely removed and that its effects or consequences cannot be considered “managed” even when an occurrence (i.e., a smell) is repaid. Rather than using a mathematical approach, we present TDM in terms of the four components of infinite games (players, rules, goals, and time), its tradeoffs and relationships, to discuss its potential impact on TDM activities. As this is an incipient area, our goal is to motivate a change of mindset regarding TDM, stimulating reflective thinking and thus, posing a new line of research. We conclude with a series of potential research questions organised into three key areas.