An Exploratory Study on the Introduction and Removal of Different Types of Technical Debt

TL;DR

This study investigates how different types of self-admitted technical debt are introduced and removed in deep learning frameworks, revealing common patterns and providing insights for better debt management in critical software systems.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of the introduction and removal patterns of various technical debt types across multiple deep learning frameworks, highlighting common behaviors and practical implications.

Findings

Design debt is most frequently introduced during development.

Requirement debt is most often removed, with design debt being removed the fastest.

Most technical debt is removed by the developers who introduced it.

Abstract

To complete tasks faster, developers often have to sacrifice the quality of the software. Such compromised practice results in the increasing burden to developers in future development. The metaphor, technical debt, describes such practice. Prior research has illustrated the negative impact of technical debt, and many researchers investigated how developers deal with a certain type of technical debt. However, few studies focused on the removal of different types of technical debt in practice. To fill this gap, we use the introduction and removal of different types of self-admitted technical debt (i.e., SATD) in 7 deep learning frameworks as an example. This is because deep learning frameworks are some of the most important software systems today due to their prevalent use in life-impacting deep learning applications. Moreover, the field of the development of different deep learning frameworks is the same, which enables us to find common behaviors on the removal of different types of technical debt across projects. By mining the file history of these frameworks, we find that design debt is introduced the most along the development process. As for the removal of technical debt, we find that requirement debt is removed the most, and design debt is removed the fastest. Most of test debt, design debt, and requirement debt are removed by the developers who introduced them. Based on the introduction and removal of different types of technical debt, we discuss the evolution of the frequencies of different types of technical debt to depict the unresolved sub-optimal trade-offs or decisions that are confronted by developers along the development process. We also discuss the removal patterns of different types of technical debt, highlight future research directions, and provide recommendations for practitioners.