Context . Technical debt (TD) prevention allows software practitioners to apply practices to avoid potential TD items in their projects. Aims . To uncover and prioritize, from the point of view of software practitioners, the practices that could be used to avoid TD items, the relations between these practices and the causes of TD, and the practice avoidance reasons (PARs) that could explain the failure to prevent TD. Method . We analyze data collected from six replications of a global industrial family of surveys on TD, totaling 653 answers. We also conducted a follow up survey to understand the importance level of analyzed data. Results . Most practitioners indicated that TD could be prevented, revealing 89 prevention practices and 23 PARs for explaining the failure to prevent TD. The article identifies statistically significant relationships between preventive practices and certain causes of TD. Further, it prioritizes the list of practices, PARs, and relationships regarding their level of importance for TD prevention based on the opinion of software practitioners. Conclusion . This work organizes TD prevention practices and PARs in a conceptual map and the relationships between practices and causes of TD in a Sankey diagram to help the visualization of the body of knowledge reported in this study.

Background: Software testers manifest confirmation bias (the cognitive tendency) when they design relatively more specification consistent test cases than specification inconsistent test cases. Time pressure may influence confirmation bias of testers per the research in the psychology discipline.Objective: We examine the manifestation of confirmation bias of software testers while designing functional test cases, and the effect of time pressure on confirmation bias in the same context.Method: We executed one internal and two external experimental replications concerning the original experimentation in Oulu. We analyse individual replications and meta-analyse our family of experiments (the original and replications) for joint results on the phenomena. Results: Our findings indicate a significant manifestation of confirmation bias by software testers during the designing of functional test cases. Time pressure significantly promoted confirmation bias among testers per the joint results of the family. The different experimental sites affected the results; however, we did not detect any effects of site-specific variables.Conclusion: Software testers should develop an outside-of-the-box thinking attitude to counter the manifestation of confirmation bias. Time pressure can be manoeuvred by centring manual suites on the designing and consequently the execution of inconsistent test cases, while automated testing focuses on consistent ones.

Background: The concept of technical debt (TD) describes a phenomenon that impacts software projects and makes them difficult to manage. In recent years, various techniques and best practices in terms of TD management were proposed and although important on its own this knowledge must be complemented with a broader comprehension of what causes TD and what are the effects of TD. This paper presents a replication of the InsighTD survey-a globally distributed family of industrial surveys on causes and effects of TD-and thus amplifies the InsighTD reach and expands its knowledge base. Objective: The research presented in this paper gives insight on the state of practice and understanding of the TD concept alongside with data on causes and effects of TD in the Serbian IT industry. Method: A nation-wide survey, as a part of the InsighTD initiative, was conducted in Serbia in order to obtain feedback from software industry practitioners. Results: In total 93 practitioners from the Serbian IT industry filled out the survey. The results indicate that the concept of TD is broadly distributed, but at the same time it is not widely accepted for use (only 35% of participants had some sort of practical experiences with projects that were TD aware). The top cited causes were: deadlines, ineffective project management, lack of experience, test not performed and misconduct. On the other side the most common effects of TD were: low maintainability, increased effort, rework and low external quality. Conclusion: The research presented in this paper confirms the original study findings that deadlines are the top cited cause of TD. It also identifies new causes of TD in the context of InsighTD, with misconduct being one of the most cited ones. Regarding the effects of TD this research differs in most of the top 10 identified effects from the original study but confirms the occurrence of some effects most cited.

Background: There is a growing body of knowledge on Technical Debt (TD) in recent years. This knowledge provides various explanations of the term and suggests different remedies for it. However, the knowledge is yet to be validated in software development processes. Aims: The objective of this study is twofold. First, to get empirical insight on the understanding and the use of the TD concept in Serbian IT industry. Second, to contribute towards precise conceptualization of the TD concept. Method: We conducted a national-wide survey to collect feedback from industry practitioners. The survey is a part of InsighTD-an international initiative to investigate causes and effects of TD. Results: In total, 93 responses were collected, mostly from developers. Results indicate that the concept of TD is not widely accepted for use by the industry, only 35% of practitioners have practical experiences with projects that explicitly considered or managed TD. The most common types of TD are: code, test and design debt that together account for 61% of all reported cases. The archetypal TD case is caused by a tight schedule and resulted with non-optimal solutions that are difficult to evolve and in constant need of rework. Conclusions: Implications are at one hand for academics, who should consider TD as a topic for their curriculums since the results revealed that novice developers are unfamiliar with the concept. At the other hand, industry practitioners have a well aligned understanding of the TD concept, which is consistent with TD literature. However, we perceive that the wider use of the existing tools and techniques for managing TD can significantly help practitioners to deal with the top three occurring TD types.