Racing Against the Clock: Exploring the Impact of Scheduled Deadlines on Technical Debt
Joshua Aldrich Edbert, Zadia Codabux, Roberto Verdecchia
TL;DR
Racing Against the Clock investigates how scheduled deadlines influence Technical Debt (TD) in OSS with regular release cadences. The study combines longitudinal SonarQube TD measurements via $d(SQALE)/dt$ with commit-activity and issue-tracking analyses across eight large OSS projects, using daily last-commit snapshots and 7-day around-deadline windows. Findings reveal highly project-dependent TD dynamics, with some projects showing increased TD near deadlines (Hill patterns) and others showing stability or different timing, while commit spikes and post-deadline bug-related issue activity are common in several cases; however, no universal causal link is established. The work highlights the need to mitigate last-minute coding rushes and suggests that project maturity and team practices mediate TD impacts, offering practical guidance for TD management and directions for broader, more nuanced future research. Limitations include reliance on a single TD metric, a modest OSS sample, and incomplete data for some projects, motivating broader future studies and richer TD measurements.
Abstract
Background: Technical Debt (TD) describes suboptimal software development practices with long-term consequences, such as defects and vulnerabilities. Deadlines are a leading cause of the emergence of TD in software systems. While multiple aspects of TD have been studied, the empirical research findings on the impact of deadlines are still inconclusive. Aims: This study investigates the impact of scheduled deadlines on TD. It analyzes how scheduled deadlines affect code quality, commit activities, and issues in issue-tracking systems. Method: We analyzed eight Open Source Software (OSS) projects with regular release schedules using SonarQube. We analyzed 12.3k commits and 371 releases across these eight OSS projects. The study combined quantitative metrics with qualitative analyses to comprehensively understand TD accumulation under scheduled deadlines. Results: Our findings indicated that some projects had a clear increase in TD as deadlines approached (with above 50% of releases having increasing TD accumulation as deadlines approached), while others managed to maintain roughly the same amount of TD. Analysis of commit activities and issue tracking revealed that deadline proximity could lead to increased commit frequency and bug-related issue creation. Conclusions: Our study highlights that, in some cases, impending deadlines have a clear impact on TD. The findings pinpoint the need to mitigate last-minute coding rushes and the risks associated with deadline-driven TD accumulation.