  The technical debt (TD) metaphor is widely used to encapsulate numerous
software quality problems. She describes the trade-off between the short term
benefit of taking a shortcut during the design or implementation phase of a
software product (for example, in order to meet a deadline) and the long term
consequences of taking said shortcut, which may affect the quality of the
software product. TDs must be managed to guarantee the software quality and
also reduce its maintenance and evolution costs. However, the tools for TD
detection usually provide results only considering the files perspective (class
and methods), that is not usual during the project management. In this work, a
technique is proposed to identify/visualize TD on a new perspective: software
features. The proposed technique adopts Mining Software Repository (MRS) tools
to identify the software features and after the technical debts that affect
these features. Additionally, we also proposed an approach to support
maintenance tasks guided by TD visualization at the feature level aiming to
evaluate its applicability on real software projects. The results indicate that
the approach can be useful to decrease the existent TDs, as well as avoid the
introduction of new TDs.
