Familiarity, Causes and Reactions of Software Practitioners to the Presence of Technical Debt: A Replicated Study in the Chilean Software Industry

Decisions made to accomplish short-term goals but affecting negatively the maintainability of the system is called Technical Debt (TD). In Chile, where software industry is rising 11% every year, it becomes crucial to understand how TD is perceived in software teams, its causes and how they are dealing with it. To accomplish this task we ran a TD survey, as a part of InsighTD. Results showed that almost two thirds of the respondents had some level of familiarity with the concept of TD. Among them, lack of qualified professionals is the most cited cause in general and, also, by software architects and developers. Conversely, planning and management is the most cited category of causes of TD. Results indicated that the concept of TD is well understood by software practitioners and that most efforts need to be invested by researchers on offering strategies and tools to support TD management.