Understanding Technical Debt at the Code Level from the Perspective of Software Developers

Keeping the source code clean and organized throughout the software development and evolution is a challenging task. Due to many factors, design choices that cause the overall code structure to decay may be made and implemented, so that benefits, such as reduced development time, can be obtained in the short term. In order to deal with these situations, the metaphor of technical debt emerged to allow such situations to be systematically managed. Although this concept is already known in academia, there are limited evidences that the industry widely adopts it. Therefore, this paper presents the results of a survey involving 74 participants that work in the Brazilian software industry, in order to understand why technical debt is introduced, eliminated and how it is managed in practice, with a focus on the code level. Our survey is not limited to the explicit management of technical debt but also includes the notion that the introduction of poor code without the awareness that it is a poor design choice can also become a debt. Such a code can be acknowledged as a debt to be paid as the software evolves. Our results show that overload of work and lack of time, together with pressure from the management, are the main reasons for the creation of technical debt. However, when participants evaluate other developers, they believe that inexperience also plays a key role. Moreover, the most effective practice to avoid the creation of technical debt is code review, in the opinion of participants.