Wait For It: Identifying "On-Hold" Self-Admitted Technical Debt
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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 335 comments indicating self-admitted technical debt, we first identify one particular class of debt amenable to automated management: "on-hold" self-admitted technical debt, 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 automatically identify these "on-hold" instances with a precision of 0.81 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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