  Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software
development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they
should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper
presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a
business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage
of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design
Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration,
engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved
the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different groups of three
companies. The initial evaluation shows that the presented framework is
coherent in its structure and that its results contribute to business-driven
decision making on technical debt prioritization.
