Five reasons for including technical debt in the software engineering curriculum

Technical Debt is a useful metaphor to explain some of the difficulties of software evolution. The concept of Technical Debt is gaining importance from a scientific perspective, as the number of related papers, special issues, and international events grow over the years. From a practical perspective, the number of tools related to Technical Debt and their industrial adoption grow as well. Despite this high interest, Technical Debt is not yet included in the software engineering curriculum and hence the greater part of students graduating in computer science or software engineering does not know about Technical Debt. The aim of this paper is to discuss the inclusion of Technical Debt in the software engineering curriculum. We claim that Technical Debt should be treated as a first class entity the same as Requirements Engineering, Software Design and Architecture, and Software Testing. We support our claim by presenting five reasons why Technical Debt should be included in the software engineering curriculum.