  Technical Debt management decisions always imply a trade-off among outcomes
at different points in time. In such intertemporal choices, distant outcomes
are often valued lower than close ones, a phenomenon known as temporal
discounting. Technical Debt research largely develops prescriptive approaches
for how software engineers should make such decisions. Few have studied how
they actually make them. This leaves open central questions about how software
practitioners make decisions.
  This paper investigates how software practitioners discount uncertain future
outcomes and whether they exhibit temporal discounting. We adopt experimental
methods from intertemporal choice, an active area of research. We administered
an online questionnaire to 33 developers from two companies in which we
presented choices between developing a feature and making a longer-term
investment in architecture. The results show wide-spread temporal discounting
with notable differences in individual behavior. The results are consistent
with similar studies in consumer behavior and raise a number of questions about
the causal factors that influence temporal discounting in software engineering.
As the first empirical study on intertemporal choice in SE, the paper
establishes an empirical basis for understanding how software developers
approach intertemporal choice and provides a blueprint for future studies.
