## 4 Results
### Findings per Technical Debt Type
#### 4.3.14. Documentation Debt  
Definition: Insufficient, inconsistent, or outdated documentation covering datasets, models, evaluation procedures, and platform infrastructure. Problem: Missing or unclear documentation hampers reproducibility, transparency, and post-competition knowledge transfer. Example: Lack of documented preprocessing steps in a winning solution prevents organizers from validating or integrating the model into production systems. Stakeholder: Organizer  
Severity Score: 4--Compromises transparency, onboarding, and reuse. 4.3.15. People--Social Debt  
Definition: Socio-technical misalignments, communication breakdowns, and lack of cross-disciplinary collaboration practices within or across teams. Problem: Misunderstandings between data scientists, engineers, and organizers create delays, mistrust, and systemic inefficiencies. Example: A team fails to deploy their solution because of coordination gaps between model developers and DevOps engineers during the evaluation phase. Stakeholder: Both, Organizer and Participant  
Severity Score: 3--Significant hidden risk affecting collaboration, productivity, and system robustness. 4.3.16. Ethics Debt  
Definition: Liabilities stemming from neglecting fairness, transparency, explainability, and accountability in AI competition design and evaluation. Problem: When fairness auditing and explainability are not explicitly required, competitions may reward models that perform well on metrics but encode unintended biases. Example: For instance, in a healthcare competition, biased training data and the absence of fairness checks led a winning model to systematically underperform on underrepresented groups. Stakeholder: Both, Organizer and Participant  
Severity Score: 5--Critical ethical and societal risks, particularly in sensitive application domains. 4.3.17. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD)  
Definition: Developer-recognized shortcuts or compromises explicitly documented via comments, TODOs, or deferred improvements in codebases. Problem: SATD left unresolved in competition submissions can propagate hidden defects and technical liabilities into production environments. Example: A winning solution includes TODO comments about normalization errors that were never addressed, compromising reproducibility in downstream evaluations. Stakeholder: Participant  
Severity Score: 4--Hidden but impactful; undermines maintainability and trust. 4.3.18. Defect Debt  
Definition: Accumulation of unresolved bugs, faulty logic, or data leakage vulnerabilities within competition systems or submitted models. Problem: Inadequate validation allows latent defects to affect scoring accuracy, leaderboard fairness, and participant trust. Example: A submission exploits a silent bug in the evaluation API to manipulate leaderboard rankings, discovered only after post-competition audits. Stakeholder: Organizer  
Severity Score: 4--Directly compromises trust, fairness, and scientific validity. To enhance clarity and support practical understanding, Table 4 provides a consolidated overview of the 19 technical debt types identified in this study. Each row maps a debt type to the primary stakeholder(s) it affects, outlines its typical impact on AI-based competition platforms, and suggests representative mitigation strategies. To further assist readers in navigating the assessment tool, the table also includes references to the corresponding questionnaire items. This synthesis facilitates a smooth conceptual transition from the thematic findings to the stakeholder-oriented evaluation instrument presented in Section 5. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline
**No. ** & \begin{tabular}{c} **Technical Debt** \\ **Type** \\ \end{tabular}  & **Primary Stakeholder(s)** & \begin{tabular}{c} **Key Impact on** \\ **Stakeholders** \\ \end{tabular}  & \ \begin{tabular}{c} **Suggested** \\ **Mitigation** \\ \end{tabular}  & \begin{tabular}{c} **Code Ref. in** \\ **Questionnaire** \\ \end{tabular}  \\ \hline
1 & \begin{tabular}{c} \\ **Algorithm** \\ \end{tabular}  & Participant &