Investigating technical debt folklore: Shedding some light on technical debt opinion

We identified and organized a number of statements about technical debt (TD Folklore list) expressed by practitioners in online websites, blogs and published papers. We chose 14 statements and we evaluated them through two surveys (37 practitioners answered the questionnaires), ranking them by agreement and consensus. The statements most agreed with show that TD is an important factor in software project management and not simply another term for “bad code”. This study will help the research community in identifying folklore that can be translated into research questions to be investigated, thus targeting attempts to provide a scientific basis for TD management.