FixMe: A GitHub Bot for Detecting and Monitoring On-Hold Self-Admitted Technical Debt
This addresses a specific monitoring inefficiency for software developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SATD detection methods.
The paper tackles the problem of developers missing resolved issues linked to on-hold self-admitted technical debt (SATD) in code comments, proposing FixMe, a GitHub bot that detects and monitors such debt and notifies developers when issues are resolved, with evaluation involving 11 participants showing it supports them in handling on-hold SATD.
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.