Identification and Remediation of Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Issue Trackers
This work addresses the problem of understanding and managing technical debt for software developers, but it is incremental as it extends SATD research from source code to issue trackers.
The study investigated self-admitted technical debt (SATD) in issue trackers by manually analyzing 500 issues from Hadoop and Camel, identifying 152 SATD items across eight types and finding that most debt is repaid, with median and average repayment times of 872.3 and 25.0 hours, respectively.
Technical debt refers to taking shortcuts to achieve short-term goals, which might negatively influence software maintenance in the long-term. There is increasing attention on technical debt that is admitted by developers in source code comments (termed as self-admitted technical debt or SATD). But SATD in issue trackers is relatively unexplored. We performed a case study, where we manually examined 500 issues from two open source projects (i.e. Hadoop and Camel), which contained 152 SATD items. We found that: 1) eight types of technical debt are identified in issues, namely architecture, build, code, defect, design, documentation, requirement, and test debt; 2) developers identify technical debt in issues in three different points in time, and a small part is identified by its creators; 3) the majority of technical debt is paid off, 4) mostly by those who identified it or created it; 5) the median time and average time to repay technical debt are 872.3 and 25.0 hours respectively.