Recommendations for Dealing with Unexpected Challenges in Paying Back Documentation Debt

Technical debt has become a significant concern for organizations that accumulate increasingly complex information systems architectures. Broadly defined as future system-maintenance obligations, technical debt comes in various forms. Documentation debt is a notoriously insidious type of technical debt that leads to inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated information, thereby confusing or misleading users. To study how organizations can address issues around insufficient system documentation, an action research project closely followed a company’s efforts to settle its documentation debt. The case revealed that resolving documentation debt is a complex process involving four phases (realization, resourcing, documenting, and evaluation) that manifest multiple feedback loops. The resulting practitioner-oriented contribution articulates four recommendations that support organizational efforts to manage documentation debt. The recommendations should aid managers in developing strategies to repay documentation debt and prevent it from cascading out of control.