An open challenge in Technical Debt (TD) research is to translate TD threats into economic opportunities, so development teams can make a strong case to the business side to invest on paying off TD by increasing Technical Wealth (TW). For this, a comprehensive TD/TW theory (e.g., standardizing ambiguous terms into a consistent vocabulary) is needed to formalize and consolidate relationships between the costs of technical debt and benefits of technical wealth. We aim to gather practitioners and researchers working in this area, to share experiences, concur on terminologies and evaluation guidelines.

The TDA 2016 workshop offers a specialised arena in TD to address the following goals: (1) Calibrating technical debt and technical wealth related terminologies and concepts that are used indistinctly and interchangeably in software engineering literature, and (2) Comparing, integrating, compiling and even reconciling empirical work on the effects of technical debt/technical wealth from economic and organisational perspectives.