Does Technical Debt Lead to the Rejection of Pull Requests?
This research addresses the problem of understanding how Technical Debt affects pull request outcomes for software developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing identification studies.
The study investigated whether Technical Debt leads to the rejection of pull requests by analyzing 1,722 pull requests, finding that design debt is the most common at 39.34%, followed by test debt at 23.70% and project convention debt at 15.64%.
Technical Debt is a term used to classify non-optimal solutions during software development. These solutions cause several maintenance problems and hence they should be avoided or at least documented. Although there are a considered number of studies that focus on the identification of Technical Debt, we focus on the identification of Technical Debt in pull requests. Specifically, we conduct an investigation to reveal the different types of Technical Debt that can lead to the rejection of pull requests. From the analysis of 1,722 pull requests, we classify Technical Debt in seven categories namely design, documentation, test, build, project convention, performance, or security debt. Our results indicate that the most common category of Technical Debt is design with 39.34%, followed by test with 23.70% and project convention with 15.64%. We also note that the type of Technical Debt influences on the size of push request discussions, e.g., security and project convention debts instigate more discussion than the other types.