  Incorporating the business perspective into prioritizing technical debt is
essential to contribute to decision making in industry. In this paper, we
evolve and evaluate a business-driven approach for technical debt
prioritization. The approach was evaluated during a five-month industrial case
study with business and technical stakeholders' active participation. The
results show that the approach contributed to aligning business criteria
between the business and technical stakeholders. We also observed a downward
trend in the amount of technical debt that affects high-value business assets.
Moreover, we identified eight business factors that affect the decision making
related to the prioritization of technical debt. The study results suggest that
the proposed business-driven technical debt prioritization approach can help
teams to focus their efforts on paying off the business' most relevant debt.
