Beyond Technical Debt as We Know It: New Practices, New Risks, New Research

When: 28. Mai 2026, 9:00 - 13:00

Where: Ole Johan Dahl hus (Gaustadsalleen 23B): Informatikksalen (5462), 5th floor

Technical debt is the “invisible interest rate” on every software decision we make.

Now AI is rewriting that interest table: Accelerating how we find, create, manage, and sometimes accidentally multiply that debt.

In this seminar, we’ll share three years of results from the TechDebtOps innovation project, bringing together perspectives from Visma, AkvaGroup, Knowit, SINTEF and UiO. You’ll hear what actually works in industry today, what hard‑won lessons remain stubbornly true, and which new AI‑driven practices are changing the game. We’ll highlight concrete takeaways for practitioners, fresh questions for researchers, and then open the floor in an interactive fishbowl session where you help shape the next wave of technical debt and AI research.

Program

9.00 Visma (project Owner)

Will present the project, and key results such as 1) practicing and assessing Technical Debt management, 2) Using AI to manage Technical Debt and 3) key challenges and directions for future research

9.30 AKVAGroup

Will present key results from the project related to the usage of tools to assess Technical Debt in their codebase.

9.50 Knowit (Jan Henrik Gundelsby, Truls Unholt)

Will show potential commercialization results from the project, as well as exciting key directions for future research.

10.10 - break

10.30 SINTEF (Phu Nguyen)

Highlights from our key results such as 1) Combining Insights from Multiple Tools to Manage Technical Debt, 2) DebtGuardianAgentic, and 3) An AI-based Pipeline for Refactoring Suggestions

10.50 UiO (Antonio Martini)

Highlights from key results such as an AI-powered automatic tagger of Technical Debt and qualities and a novel method to uncover and visualize the causes of technical debt in organizations.

11.10 Fishbowl Interactive Panel

A panel where we start by inviting one participant for each company in the project to answer a few questions about the future of Technical Debt and AI. The fishbowl interactive panel makes sure that also the rest of the participants can sit in the panel and share their thoughts, in a rotating way, so that everyone has the opportunity to join.

12.00 - 13.00 - lunch (upon registration by 26th of may)