Technical Debt Impacting Lead-Times: An Exploratory Study

Background: Technical Debt is a consolidated notion in software engineering research and practice. However, the estimation of its impact (interest of the debt) is still imprecise and requires heavy empirical and experimental inquiry. Objective: We aim at developing a data-driven approach to calculate the interest of Technical Debt in terms of delays in resolving affected tasks.Method: We conducted a case study to estimate the Technical Debt interest by analyzing its association with the lead time variation of resolving related Jira issues.Results: Data-driven approaches could significantly change the Technical Debt estimation and improve the removing Technical Debt prioritization. Our case study shows that the presence of Code Technical Debt did not affect the lead time for resolving the issues.Conclusion: Future works include the further refinement of this approach and its application to a larger data-set and on different type of issues.