TechDebt 2019
Sun 26 - Mon 27 May 2019 Montreal, QC, Canada
co-located with ICSE 2019
Sun 26 May 2019 11:40 - 12:00 at Viger - Managing Technical Debt Chair(s): Clemente Izurieta

Technical Debt management decisions always imply a trade-off among outcomes at different points in time. In such intertemporal choices, distant outcomes are often valued lower than close ones, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting. Technical Debt research largely develops prescriptive approaches for how software engineers should make such decisions. Few have studied how they actually make them. This leaves open central questions about how software practitioners make decisions. This paper investigates how software practitioners discount uncertain future outcomes and whether they exhibit temporal discounting. We adopt experimental methods from intertemporal choice, an active area of research. We administered an online questionnaire to 33 developers from two companies in which we presented choices between developing a feature and making a longer-term investment in architecture. The results show wide-spread temporal discounting with notable differences in individual behavior. The results are consistent with similar studies in consumer behavior and raise a number of questions about the causal factors that influence temporal discounting in software engineering. As the first empirical study on intertemporal choice in SE, the paper establishes an empirical basis for understanding how software developers approach intertemporal choice and provides a blueprint for future studies.

Sun 26 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

11:00 - 12:00
Managing Technical DebtTechDebt 2019 at Viger
Chair(s): Clemente Izurieta Montana State University
11:00
20m
Talk
Supporting Analysis of Technical Debt Causes and Effects with Cross-Company Probabilistic Cause–Effect Diagrams
TechDebt 2019
Manoel Gomes Mendonça , Carolyn Seaman University of Maryland Baltimore County
11:20
20m
Talk
Technical Debt Triage in Backlog Management
TechDebt 2019
Terese Besker Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, Antonio Martini University of Oslo, Norway, Jan Bosch Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
11:40
20m
Research paper
Temporal Discounting in Technical Debt: How Do Software Practitioners Discount the Future?
TechDebt 2019
Christoph Becker University of Toronto, Fabian Fagerholm University of Helsinki & Blekinge Institute of Technology, Rahul Mohanani Indraprastha Institue of Information Technology, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou University of Macedonia
Pre-print