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The cornerstones of technical debt (TD) are two concepts borrowed from economics: principal and interest. Although in economics the two terms are related, in TD there is no study on this direction so as to validate the strength of the metaphor.

We study the relation between Principal and Interest, and subsequently dig further into the ‘ingredients’ of each concept (since they are multi-faceted). In particular, we investigate if artifacts with similar levels of TD Principal exhibit a similar amount of TD Interest, and vice-versa.

To achieve this goal, we performed an empirical study, analyzing the dataset using the Mantel test. Through the Mantel test, we examined the relation between TD Principal and Interest, and identified aspects that are able to denote proximity of artifacts, with respect to TD. Next, through Linear Mixed Effects (LME) modelling we studied the generalizability of the results.

The …