Technical Debt and the Software Project Characteristics. A Repository-Based Exploratory Analysis

Technical debt is a deviation of any software project's aspect related to a quality standard previously established. In general, this deviation is created to accomplish a short-term objective, but may cause some difficulties to perform further software developments and evolutions. Even though this happens in many software projects today, there is no common understanding of which factors and conditions can contribute to the accumulation of software technical debts. To account for the aspects of software projects (like size, time, the number of commit to correct defects and the number of collaborators) that may contribute to software technical debts, we collected data from fifty projects in a public software repository to make a statistical analysis on the relation of some aspects with the software technical debts. This paper presents the results of this study from which we realized that the project's size, the number of collaborators and speed of development are the most related aspects with the number of software technical debts. On the other hand, the number of commits created to correct the defects did not show to be connected to the amount of technical debt found in the analyzed projects.