Context: Technical debt management is challenging for software engineers due to poor tool
support and a lack of knowledge on how to prioritize technical debt repayment and
prevention activities. Furthermore, when there is a large backlog of debt, developers often
lack the motivation to address it. Objective: In this paper, we describe a design study to
investigate how gamification can support Technical Debt Management in a large legacy
software system of an industrial company. Our study leads to a novel tool (named Themis) …