  Context: Technical Debt (TD) discusses the negative impact of sub-optimal
decisions to cope with the need-for-speed in software development. Code
Technical Debt Items (TDI) are atomic elements of TD that can be observed in
code artefacts. Empirical results on open-source systems demonstrated how
code-smells, which are just one type of TDIs, are introduced and "survive"
during release cycles. However, little is known about whether the results on
the survivability of code-smells hold for other types of code TDIs (i.e., bugs
and vulnerabilities) and in industrial settings. Goal: Understanding the
survivability of code TDIs by conducting an empirical study analysing two
industrial cases and 31 open-source systems from Apache Foundation. Method: We
analysed 133,670 code TDIs (35,703 from the industrial systems) detected by
SonarQube (in 193,196 commits) to assess their survivability using
survivability models. Results: In general, code TDIs tend to remain and linger
for long periods in open-source systems, whereas they are removed faster in
industrial systems. Code TDIs that survive over a certain threshold tend to
remain much longer, which confirms previous results. Our results also suggest
that bugs tend to be removed faster, while code smells and vulnerabilities tend
to survive longer.
