The Prevalence of the Technical Debt Concept in Serbian IT Industry: Results of a National-Wide Survey

Background: There is a growing body of knowledge on Technical Debt (TD) in recent years. This knowledge provides various explanations of the term and suggests different remedies for it. However, the knowledge is yet to be validated in software development processes.Aims: The objective of this study is twofold. First, to get empirical insight on the understanding and the use of the TD concept in Serbian IT industry. Second, to contribute towards precise conceptualization of the TD concept.Method: We conducted a national-wide survey to collect feedback from industry practitioners. The survey is a part of InsighTD–an international initiative to investigate causes and effects of TD.Results: In total, 93 responses were collected, mostly from developers. Results indicate that the concept of TD is not widely accepted for use by the industry, only 35% of practitioners have practical experiences with projects that explicitly considered or managed TD. The most common types of TD are: code, test and design debt that together account for 61% of all reported cases. The archetypal TD case is caused by a tight schedule and resulted with non-optimal solutions that are difficult to evolve and in constant need of rework.Conclusions: Implications are at one hand for academics, who should consider TD as a topic for their curriculums since the results revealed that novice developers are unfamiliar with the concept. At the other hand, industry practitioners have a well aligned understanding of the TD concept, which is consistent with TD literature. However, we perceive that the wider use of the existing tools and techniques for managing TD can significantly help practitioners to deal with the top three occurring TD types.