Analyzing technical debt management in an industrial project: diffuseness and actual remediation time of SonarQube issues

Technical Debt (TD) affects nearly all software projects, with tools like SonarQube (SQ) used to detect and estimate its severity and remediation effort. This paper examines TD management in an Italian software company that developed a software product in the railway domain. We assess SQ accuracy in estimating remediation efforts by comparing it to actual developer remediation times. Results indicate that SQ generally overestimates remediation time for this closed-source code base.