TechDebt 2026 Most Influential Paper Award has been awarded to the paper “The Perception of Technical Debt in the Embedded Systems Domain: An Industrial Case Study”, authored by Areti Ampatzoglou, Apostolos Ampatzoglou, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou, Paris Avgeriou, Pekka Abrahamsson (GPT-Lab), Antonio Martini, Uwe Zdun, and Kari Systä (Tampere University).
Originally published at the Managing Technical Debt (MTD) workshop in 2016, the paper provided one of the first comprehensive industrial perspectives on how technical debt is perceived and managed in the embedded systems domain. The authors conducted a multiple case study involving seven embedded systems companies across five countries: Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, and Finland. The study focuses on component lifetimes, common types of technical debt, and the role of technical debt in relation to run-time quality attributes.
Over the past decade, the paper has had a lasting impact on the Technical Debt community, making it a deserving recipient of the TechDebt 2026 Most Influential Paper Award. All authors have been invited to TechDebt Conference 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, where they will be honored and share their reflections on the paper’s influence and continued relevance in today’s software engineering landscape
