Defining and Evaluating Prudence and Recklessness of Enterprise Architecture Debt

Enterprise architecture (EA) debt represents the contingent liability that emerges from sub-optimal architectural decisions. Such decisions are usually taken to meet immediate needs under tight enterprise constraints, often at the expense of long-term sustainability. To prevent the reckless accumulation of EA debt, decision-makers should exercise prudence in selecting and implementing architectural decisions. However, EA management practices involve a wide range of stakeholders groups, making it challenging to align the different opinions that may arise on the prudence or recklessness of an architectural decision affecting EA debt. In other fields related to EA debt such as technical and financial debt, the concepts of prudence and recklessness have been extensively studied—yet little has been done to support the evaluation of these concepts in a practical context. In our previous work, we introduced a process for evaluating the prudence and recklessness of an architectural decision based on its effects on EA debt. This paper provides extensive details about the process, including the definitions of the concepts involved, theoretical references gathered through a systematic literature review, and illustrative demonstration of the process’ execution. Last but not least, we elaborate on the procedure and results of the evaluation of the proposed process, which was performed through interviews with EA researchers and practitioners.