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Managing technical debt (TD) is critical to ensure the sustainability of long-term software projects. However, the time and cost involved in technical debt management (TDM) often discourage practitioners from performing this activity…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-14 João Paulo Biazotto , Daniel Feitosa , Paris Avgeriou , Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

Context: Technical lag accumulates when software systems fail to keep pace with technological advancements, leading to a deterioration in software quality. Objective: This paper aims to consolidate existing research on technical lag,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Shane K. Panter , Nasir U. Eisty

Generative AI is accelerating software development, but may quietly shift where the most significant risks lie. As AI generates code faster than teams can understand it, two under appreciated forms of debt accumulate: cognitive debt, the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Margaret-Anne Storey

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-02-09 Matthieu Foucault , Xavier Blanc , Margaret-Anne Storey , Jean-Rémy Falleri , Cédric Teyton

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,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Terese Besker , Antonio Martini , Jan Bosch

Technical debt is often the result of Short Run decisions made during code development, which can lead to long-term maintenance costs and risks. Hence, evaluating the progression of a project and understanding related code quality aspects…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Benedikt Dornauer , Michael Felderer , Johannes Weinzerl , Mircea-Cristian Racasan , Martin Hess

The technical state of software, i.e., its technical debt (TD) and maintainability are of increasing interest as ever more software is developed and deployed. Since td and maintainability are neither uniformly defined, not easy to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Rolf-Helge Pfeiffer , Mircea Lungu

Software practitioners can make sub-optimal decisions concerning requirements during gathering, documenting, prioritizing, and implementing requirements as software features or architectural design decisions -- this is captured by the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Judith Perera , Ewan Tempero , Yu-Cheng Tu , Kelly Blincoe , Matthias Galster

Software analytics can be improved by surveying; i.e. rechecking and (possibly) revising the labels offered by prior analysis. Surveying is a time-consuming task and effective surveyors must carefully manage their time. Specifically, they…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-05-22 Fahmid M. Fahid , Zhe Yu , Tim Menzies

Technical Debt is a metaphor used to describe the situation in which long-term software artifact quality is traded for short-term goals in software projects. In recent years, the concept of self-admitted technical debt (SATD) was proposed,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Tao Xiao , Dong Wang , Shane McIntosh , Hideaki Hata , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Takashi Ishio , Kenichi Matsumoto

The recent advancements in machine learning (ML) have demonstrated the potential for providing a powerful solution to build complex prediction systems in a short time. However, in highly regulated industries, such as the financial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Chong Huang , Arash Nourian , Kevin Griest

Technical debt is a metaphor indicating sub-optimal solutions implemented for short-term benefits by sacrificing the long-term maintainability and evolvability of software. A special type of technical debt is explicitly admitted by software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Yikun Li , Mohamed Soliman , Paris Avgeriou

The technical debt (TD) metaphor is widely used to encapsulate numerous software quality problems. She describes the trade-off between the short term benefit of taking a shortcut during the design or implementation phase of a software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Ronivon Dias , Pedro Neto , Irvayne Ibiapina , Guilherme Avelino e Otavio Castro

Existing software tools enable characterizing and measuring the amount of technical debt at selective granularity levels. In this paper we aim to study the evolution and characteristics of technical debt in open-source software. We carry…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Arthur-Jozsef Molnar , Simona Motogna

Context: Technical debt (TD) is a widely studied metaphor that helps to explain how sub-optimal decisions that can harm software maintainability over time. Although incurring TD is not intrinsically bad, tracking and managing TD are crucial…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-29 João Paulo Biazotto , Daniel Feitosa , Paris Avgeriou , Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor for code-related problems that arise as a result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code. Given that the reduction of TDs can have long-term positive impact in the software engineering life-cycle…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-01-13 Junaed Younus Khan , Gias Uddin

Technical debt (TD) refers to delayed tasks and immature artifacts that may bring short-term benefits but incur extra costs of change during maintenance and evolution in the long term. TD has been extensively studied in the past decade, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Zengyang Li , Yilin Peng , Peng Liang , Apostolos Ampatzoglou , Ran Mo , Hui Liu , Xiaoxiao Qi

Managing technical debt (TD) is essential for maintaining long-term software projects. Nonetheless, the time and cost involved in technical debt management (TDM) are often high, which may lead practitioners to omit TDM tasks. The adoption…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-06 João Paulo Biazotto , Daniel Feitosa , Paris Avgeriou , Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

The concept of technical debt has been explored from many perspectives but its precise estimation is still under heavy empirical and experimental inquiry. We aim to understand whether, by harnessing approximate, data-driven,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-08-05 Valentina Lenarduzzi , Antonio Martini , Davide Taibi , Damian Andrew Tamburri

Increased popularity of `intelligent' web services provides end-users with machine-learnt functionality at little effort to developers. However, these services require a decision threshold to be set which is dependent on problem-specific…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Alex Cummaudo , Scott Barnett , Rajesh Vasa , John Grundy