Wait for it: Identifying 'on-hold' self-admitted technical debt
Self-admitted technical debt refers to situations where a software developer knows that their current implementation is not optimal and indicates this using a source code comment. In this work, we hypothesize that it is possible to develop automated techniques to understand a subset of these comment...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | text |
| Language: | English |
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Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
2020
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| Online Access: | https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8799 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9802/viewcontent/emse20b.pdf |
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| Institution: | Singapore Management University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Self-admitted technical debt refers to situations where a software developer knows that their current implementation is not optimal and indicates this using a source code comment. In this work, we hypothesize that it is possible to develop automated techniques to understand a subset of these comments in more detail, and to propose tool support that can help developers manage self-admitted technical debt more effectively. Based on a qualitative study of 333 comments indicating self-admitted technical debt, we first identify one particular class of debt amenable to automated management: on-hold self-admitted technical debt (on-hold SATD), i.e., debt which contains a condition to indicate that a developer is waiting for a certain event or an updated functionality having been implemented elsewhere. We then design and evaluate an automated classifier which can identify these on-hold instances with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.98 as well as detect the specific conditions that developers are waiting for. Our work presents a first step towards automated tool support that is able to indicate when certain instances of self-admitted technical debt are ready to be addressed. |
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