  When developing software, it is vitally important to keep the level of
technical debt down since it is well established from several studies that
technical debt can, e.g., lower the development productivity, decrease the
developers' morale, and compromise the overall quality of the software.
However, even if researchers and practitioners working in today's software
development industry are quite familiar with the concept of technical debt and
its related negative consequences, there has been no empirical research
focusing specifically on how software managers actively communicate and manage
the need to keep the level of technical debt as low as possible.
