  Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are
intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential
short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit.
However, how software professionals make intertemporal decisions is not well
understood.
  Aim: This paper investigates how shifting time frames influence preferences
in software projects in relation to purposefully selected background factors.
  Method: We investigate temporal discounting by replicating a
questionnaire-based observational study. The replication uses a
changed-population and -experimenter design to increase the internal and
external validity of the original results.
  Results: The results of this study confirm the occurrence of temporal
discounting in samples of both professional and student participants from
different countries and demonstrate strong variance in discounting between
study participants. We found that professional experience influenced
discounting. Participants with broader professional experience exhibited less
discounting than those with narrower experience.
  Conclusions: The results provide strong empirical support for the relevance
and importance of temporal discounting in SE and the urgency of targeted
interdisciplinary research to explore the underlying mechanisms and their
theoretical and practical implications. The results suggest that technical debt
management could be improved by increasing the breadth of experience available
for critical decisions with long-term impact. In addition, the present study
provides a methodological basis for replicating temporal discounting studies in
software engineering.
