Since 2018, Dr.-Ing. Fandi Hartl has been investigating Technical Debt in the context of automotive and industrial automation systems.

During her award-winning master’s thesis at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, she conducted over 50 expert interviews and collected more than 100 real-world Technical Debt incidents, analyzing their causes and long-term consequences for companies.

For this work, she received two prestigious awards: the Wittenstein Prize and the VDI Prize for the best master’s thesis.

From 2019 to 2025, she continued her research as part of a DFG-funded project, where she further expanded her empirical studies and developed several structured approaches and tools for identifying, managing, and reducing Technical Debt, with strong positive resonance from both academia and industry.

She has translated her research into three tailored workshop formats, each offering a different depth of Technical Debt analysis. These are not just academic exercises. Each workshop is a hands-on, structured exploration of the challenges in your real engineering projects, teams, and systems.

Her scientific publications can be found on her Google Scholar profile.