[driusan]

I was pretty disappointed by the title too.

The question "Does technical debt that's been already accrued lead to the rejection of new pull requests?" is what I was expecting.

Instead, the question they're asking is "Do pull requests which add technical debt to a project get rejected?" which is.. pretty obvious. That's the whole point of code review.

They go on to analyze the breakdown of what type of defect causes more discussion by doing a simple average across all of the projects they looked at, but given the visualization in Figure 2 I don't know how you can come to any real conclusion other than "it depends on the project."

[pklausler]

Identifying technical debt is certainly part of a good code review process, but it's hardly the "whole point".