An Empirical Study of Technical Debt in Open-Source Software Systems

Technical debt (TD) is a term coined by agile software pioneer Ward Cunningham to account for the added software-system effort or cost resulting from taking early software project shortcuts. The debt metaphor reflects that debt accumulates interest: the later it is paid, the more it costs. The TD concept has achieved extensive visibility and usage in the software field, but it applies at least as strongly to cyber-physical systems. In researching the TD phenomena, we have found that open-source software projects are particularly good subjects, as they keep records of the timing, content, and rationale for each update. In this paper, we concentrate on the analysis of open-source software projects to evaluate the relationships between multiple software system characteristics and TD and the relationships between software process factors and TD.