The Dual-Edged Sword of Technical Debt: Benefits and Issues Analyzed Through Developer Discussions

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes practitioners' opinions on technical debt through NLP techniques applied to a large collection of forum posts, revealing key topics, sentiments, and challenges in managing technical debt.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive NLP-based approach to understanding developer perspectives on technical debt from large-scale online discussions, highlighting key themes and sentiments.

Findings

Eight main topics of technical debt identified

Practitioners' positive and negative opinions mapped

Challenges include unclear roles and engagement issues

Abstract

Background. Technical debt (TD) has long been one of the key factors influencing the maintainability of software products. It represents technical compromises that sacrifice long-term software quality for potential short-term benefits. Objective. This work is to collectively investigate the practitioners' opinions on the various perspectives of TD from a large collection of articles. We find the topics and latent details of each, where the sentiments of the detected opinions are also considered. Method. For such a purpose, we conducted a grey literature review on the articles systematically collected from three mainstream technology forums. Furthermore, we adopted natural language processing techniques like topic modeling and sentiment analysis to achieve a systematic and comprehensive understanding. However, we adopted ChatGPT to support the topic interpretation. Results. In this study, 2,213 forum posts and articles were collected, with eight main topics and 43 sub-topics identified. For each topic, we obtained the practitioners' collective positive and negative opinions. Conclusion. We identified 8 major topics in TD related to software development. Identified challenges by practitioners include unclear roles and a lack of engagement. On the other hand, active management supports collaboration and mitigates the impact of TD on the source code.