TechDebt 2026
Sun 12 - Mon 13 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
co-located with ICSE 2026
Sun 12 Apr 2026 11:40 - 12:00 at Oceania VII - Dominguinhos Chair(s): Ronnie de Souza Santos

Managing technical debt (TD) is critical to ensure the sustainability of long-term software projects. However, the time and cost involved in technical debt management (TDM) often discourage practitioners from performing this activity consistently. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines offer an opportunity to support TDM by embedding automated practices directly into the development workflow. Despite this potential, it remains unclear how TDM tools could be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, and we still lack established best practices for this process. To address this problem, the objective of this study is to understand how TDM tools have been used in CI/CD pipelines and also identify potential configuration anti-patterns. To this end, we conducted a large-scale mining software repository (MSR) study on GitHub. In total, we collected around 600,000 Travis CI configuration files and 50,000 supporting scripts, and identified 3,684 pipelines that contain at least one TDM tool. We applied descriptive statistics to analyze the prevalence of tools and anti-patterns, and our findings show that most tools are executed and integrated using an external script; in addition, Absent Feedback is the most common configuration anti-pattern. We believe that researchers and practitioners can use the evidence of this study to further investigate how to improve both the tools that are integrated in CI/CD and the integration practices.

Sun 12 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

11:00 - 12:30
DominguinhosTechnical Papers / Journal First / Industry Track at Oceania VII
Chair(s): Ronnie de Souza Santos University of Calgary
11:00
20m
Talk
Beyond the Code: The Value of Practicing and Evaluating Technical Debt Management
Technical Papers
Mili Orucevic Visma, Maren Maritsdatter Kruke Visma software international AS, Antonio Martini University of Oslo, Norway
11:20
20m
Industry talk
Quality Feedback in the Agentic Loop: Using CodeHealth Guardrails to Agentic Code Improvement
Industry Track
A: Markus Borg CodeScene, A: Stuart Caborn loveholidays
11:40
20m
Talk
Investigating CI/CD-based Technical Debt Management in Open-source Projects
Technical Papers
João Paulo Biazotto University of Groningen and University of São Paulo, Daniel Feitosa University of Groningen, Paris Avgeriou University of Groningen, The Netherlands, Elisa Yumi Nakagawa University of São Paulo
12:00
10m
Talk
"That Developer Left the Project!": An Introduction and Case Study of Turnover Technical Debt
Technical Papers
Roberto Verdecchia University of Florence, Edoardo Sarri University of Florence, Enrico Vicario University of Florence
Pre-print
12:10
10m
Talk
"TODO: Fix the Mess Gemini Created": Towards Understanding GenAI-Induced Self-Admitted Technical DebtVirtual Attendance
Technical Papers
Abdullah Al Mujahid Missouri University of Science and Technology, Mia Mohammad Imran Missouri University of Science and Technology
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
12:20
10m
Other
The Technical Debt Gamble: A Case Study on Technical Debt in a Large-Scale Industrial Microservice Architecture
Journal First
A: Klara Borowa Warsaw University of Technology, A: Roberto Verdecchia University of Florence
Link to publication Pre-print