Technical debt is a metaphor introduced by Cunningham to indicate "not quite right code which we postpone making it right". Examples of technical debt are code smells and bug hazards. Several techniques have been proposed to detect different types of technical debt. Among those, Potdar and Shihab defined heuristics to detect instances of self-admitted technical debt in code comments, and used them to perform an empirical study on five software systems to investigate the phenomenon. Still, very little is known about the diffusion and evolution of technical debt in software projects.
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Bavota et al. (2016) studied this question.
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