Software developer productivity loss due to technical debt—A replication and extension study examining developers’ development work

Abstract

Software companies need to deliver customer value continuously, both from a shortand long-term perspective. However, software development can be impeded by technical debt (TD). Although significant theoretical work has been undertaken to describe the negative effects of TD, little empirical evidence exists on how much wasted time and additional activities TD causes. The study aims to explore the consequences of TD in terms of wastage of development time. This study investigates on which activities this wasted time is spent and whether different TD types impact the wasted time differently. This study reports the results of a longitudinal study surveying 43 developers and including16 interviews followed by validation by an additional study using a different and independent dataset and focused on replicating the findings addressing the findings. The analysis of the reported wasted time revealed that developers waste, on average, 23% of their time due to TD and that developers are frequently forced to introduce new TD. The most common activity on which additional time is spent is performing additional testing.The study provides evidence that TD hinders developers by causing an excessive waste of working time, where the wasted time negatively affects productivity.

Refactoring, Bug Fixing, and New Development Effect on Technical Debt: An Industrial Case Study

“…Even though Refactoring slightly out performs the other activities in removing TD, it still introduces substantial amount of TD in a high proportion of cases, and in half of the cases, does not introduce observable changes in the overall amount of TD accumulated in the project. These results are similar to the previous studies (e.g., [13], [16], [27]) that suggest that developers might waste a significant proportion of their time dealing with TD in an inefficient way [13] and that refactoring operations were not found to be effective in removing TD items as Code Smells [27], or even were responsible for introducing bugs [16].…”

“…They found that, on average, 25% of development time is spent on managing TD. In [13], the authors investigate the waste of development time with regards to TD management. Their results suggest that developers waste 23% of their time on managing TD (i.e., mainly through refactoring), and developers frequently introduce new TD.…”

“…As software evolves, developers perform various manipulations to the code that can be categorized into three major types of activities: refactoring, bug fixing, and new feature development, all of which are likely to have some impact on the TD. Related studies show, for example, that developers spend, on average, 25% of the development time on managing the TD [12], while these activities are not always performed systematically but rather sporadically during the development process [12], [13]. Similarly, Palomba et al [14] and Kim et al [15] found that refactoring operations are mostly performed when new features are implemented and not as a result of dedicated code maintenance.…”

Characterizing and Mitigating Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Build Systems

“…We describe the remaining reason categories in detail using representative examples in our online appendix 5 to help the reader understand this taxonomy.…”

Investigation on Reliability Estimation of Loosely Coupled Software as a Service Execution Using Clustered and Non-Clustered Web Server

“…The applicability of the study was observed through a comparative model based on the experimental arrangement. Besker et al (2019) had discussed a review on the importance of technical debt and time management policies for the effective delivery of the SaaS execution [24]. They had stated that the quality products of the system can be achieved through proper testing strategy.…”