Developers tackle technical debt by refactoring code for improved quality
Developers often rush to finish coding projects, leading to technical debt. They document these shortcuts as comments in the code. To improve code quality, developers clean up their code through refactoring. A study of 76 Java systems found that developers usually remove technical debt by refactoring their code. They do this for specific reasons, like meeting project deadlines or improving code quality. The findings suggest that tools should be developed to help developers automatically repay technical debt.