Wait for it: Identifying 'on-hold' self-admitted technical debt

• Main Authors: MAIPRADIT, Rungroj, TREUDE, Christoph, HATA, Hideaki, MATSUMOTO, Kenichi
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Self-admitted technical debt; Qualitative study; Classification; Software Engineering
• 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
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.