Monitoring and Prevention: How Technical Debt is Managed by Software Practitioners

Technical Debt is a concept to describe the gap between current solutions and optimal solutions, which could hurt system quality. The presence of technical debt is inevitable, becoming more realistic to deal with it than try to avoid it. Therefore, it is relevant to understand how software development teams are dealing with technical debt. This study aims to characterize the practices used to monitor and prevent technical debt by software practitioners. A corpus of responses from a survey of 226 software practitioners from Chile and Colombia is used to collect and analyze these practices. Results were mostly based on the point of view of developers (87; 38.5%), project managers (49; 21.7%), and software architects (48; 21.2%) and showed that weekly/daily team meetings was the most cited practice to monitor TD items. Adoption of good practices and well-defined architecture were selected as the best practices to avoid the presence of TD in software projects.