Estimating the size, cost, and types of Technical Debt

Abstract

This study summarizes results of a study of Technical Debt across 745 business applications comprising 365 million lines of code collected from 160 companies in 10 industry segments. These applications were submitted to a static analysis that evaluates quality within and across application layers that may be coded in different languages. The analysis consists of evaluating the application against a repository of over 1200 rules of good architectural and coding practice. A formula for estimating Technical Debt with adjustable parameters is presented. Results are presented for Technical Debt across the entire sample as well as for different programming languages and quality factors.