Bibliographic record
Abstract
Technical debt is a metaphor used to convey the idea that doing things in a "quick and dirty" way when designing and constructing a software leads to a situation where one incurs more and more deferred future expenses. Similarly to financial debt, technical debt requires payment of interest in the form of the additional development effort that could have been avoided if the quick and dirty design choices have not been made. Technical debt applies to all the aspects of software development, spanning from initial requirements analysis to deployment, and software evolution. Technical debt is becoming very popular from scientific and industrial perspectives. In particular, there is an increase in the number of related papers over the years. There is also an increase in the number of related tools and of their adoption in the industry, especially since technical debt is very pricey and therefore needs to be managed. However, techniques to estimate technical debt are inadequate, insufficient since they mostly focus on requirements, code, and test, disregarding key artifacts such as the software architecture and the technologies used by the software at hand. Besides, despite its high relevance, technical debt prediction is one of the least explored aspects of technical debt. To address these shortcomings, it is mandatory that I undertake research to: 1) improve existing techniques to properly estimate technical debt; 2) to determine the extent to which the use of prediction techniques to foresee and therefore avoid technical debt could help companies save money and avoid a potential bankruptcy in the subsequent years. The proposed research can have an important economic impact by helping companies save several millions. It can have a major scientific impact by leading to key findings that will be disseminated through patents, well-established scientific journals and conferences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".