Who is producing more technical debt?
Theodoros Amanatidis, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou, Apostolos Ampatzoglou, Ioannis G. Stamelos · 2017
Technical debt (TD) impedes software projects by reducing the velocity of development teams during software evolution. Although TD is usually assessed on either the entire system or on individual software artifacts, it is the actual craftsmanship of developers that causes the accumulation of TD. In the light of extremely high maintenance costs, efficient software project management cannot occur without recognizing the relation between developer characteristics and the tendency to evoke violations that lead to TD. In this paper, we investigate three research questions related to the distribution of TD among the developers of a software project, the types of violations caused by each developer and the relation between developers' maturity and the tendency to accumulate TD. The study has been performed on four widely employed PHP open-source projects. All developers' personal characteristics have been anonymized in the study.