Rungroj Maipradit

Rungroj Maipradit, Bin Lin, Csaba Nagy et al.

Modern software is developed under considerable time pressure, which implies that developers more often than not have to resort to compromises when it comes to code that is well written and code that just does the job. This has led over the past decades to the concept of "technical debt", a short-term hack that potentially generates long-term maintenance problems. Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) is a particular form of technical debt: developers consciously perform the hack but also document it in the code by adding comments as a reminder (or as an admission of guilt). We focus on a specific type of SATD, namely "On-hold" SATD, in which developers document in their comments the need to halt an implementation task due to conditions outside of their scope of work (e.g., an open issue must be closed before a function can be implemented). We present an approach, based on regular expressions and machine learning, which is able to detect issues referenced in code comments, and to automatically classify the detected instances as either "On-hold" (the issue is referenced to indicate the need to wait for its resolution before completing a task), or as "cross-reference", (the issue is referenced to document the code, for example to explain the rationale behind an implementation choice). Our approach also mines the issue tracker of the projects to check if the On-hold SATD instances are "superfluous" and can be removed (i.e., the referenced issue has been closed, but the SATD is still in the code). Our evaluation confirms that our approach can indeed identify relevant instances of On-hold SATD. We illustrate its usefulness by identifying superfluous On-hold SATD instances in open source projects as confirmed by the original developers.

Saranphon Phaithoon, Supakarn Wongnil, Patiphol Pussawong et al.

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a special form of technical debt in which developers intentionally record their hacks in the code by adding comments for attention. Here, we focus on issue-related "On-hold SATD", where developers suspend proper implementation due to issues reported inside or outside the project. When the referenced issues are resolved, the On-hold SATD also need to be addressed, but since monitoring these issue reports takes a lot of time and effort, developers may not be aware of the resolved issues and leave the On-hold SATD in the code. In this paper, we propose FixMe, a GitHub bot that helps developers detecting and monitoring On-hold SATD in their repositories and notify them whenever the On-hold SATDs are ready to be fixed (i.e. the referenced issues are resolved). The bot can automatically detect On-hold SATD comments from source code using machine learning techniques and discover referenced issues. When the referenced issues are resolved, developers will be notified by FixMe bot. The evaluation conducted with 11 participants shows that our FixMe bot can support them in dealing with On-hold SATD. FixMe is available at https://www.fixmebot.app/ and FixMe's VDO is at https://youtu.be/YSz9kFxN_YQ.

Rungroj Maipradit, Hideaki Hata, Kenichi Matsumoto

We propose a sentiment classification method with a general machine learning framework. For feature representation, n-gram IDF is used to extract software-engineering-related, dataset-specific, positive, neutral, and negative n-gram expressions. For classifiers, an automated machine learning tool is used. In the comparison using publicly available datasets, our method achieved the highest F1 values in positive and negative sentences on all datasets.

Rungroj Maipradit, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata et al.

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 identify these "on-hold" instances with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.83 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.