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What is asked about technical debt (TD) on Stack Exchange question-and-answer (Q&A) websites? An observational study

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Abstract

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. Previous research on TD has extensively outlined and discussed the various consequences derived from accumulating TD and the difficulty in managing it. A review of the software engineering literature revealed that Stack Exchange question-and-answer (Q&A) websites can provide valuable, real world perspectives on a number of software engineering topics. Therefore, this study aims to observe how the TD term is utilized on Stack Exchange Q&A websites. Specifically, this study utilizes a dataset derived from three Stack Exchange Q&A websites, which are Stack Overflow (SO), Software Engineering (SE), and Project Management (PM), to retrieve and analyze 578 TD-related questions. The results unveiled that TD-related questions can be categorized into 14 different categories, a total of 636 unique tags are utilized in the acquired set of TD-related questions, and a few TD-related categories both lack accepted answers and have a longer median time to receive an accepted answer than other categories. This study’s findings highlight the TD-related challenges that are addressed by Stack Exchange Q&A website users, which may prove beneficial in steering future TD-related efforts.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Open Science Foundation (OSF), https://t.ly/_Fqi

Notes

  1. https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.pdf

  2. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016/

  3. stackexchange.com

  4. stackoverflow.com

  5. softwareengineering.stackexchange.com

  6. pm.stackexchange.com

  7. https://data.stackexchange.com/

  8. https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

  9. www.castsoftware.com/

  10. https://www.kiuwan.com/

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Acknowledgements

This research project was supported by a grant from the “Research Center of College of Computer and Information Sciences, Deanship of Scientific Research, King Saud University”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Reem Alfayez & Ghaida Alfayez

  2. Center for Systems and Software Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yunyan Ding, Robert Winn, Christopher Harman & Barry Boehm

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  1. Reem Alfayez
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  2. Yunyan Ding
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Correspondence to Reem Alfayez.

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Alfayez, R., Ding, Y., Winn, R. et al. What is asked about technical debt (TD) on Stack Exchange question-and-answer (Q&A) websites? An observational study. Empir Software Eng 28, 35 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10269-5

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