Was self-admitted technical debt removal a real removal?: An in-depth perspective

Fiorella Zampetti; Alexander Serebrenik; Massimiliano Di Penta

doi:10.1145/3196398.3196423

Was self-admitted technical debt removal a real removal? An in-depth perspective

Fiorella Zampetti, Alexander Serebrenik, Massimiliano Di Penta

Software Engineering and Technology

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

49 Citations (Scopus)

258 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Technical Debt (TD) has been defined as "code being not quite right yet", and its presence is often self-admitted by developers through comments. The purpose of such comments is to keep track of TD and appropriately address it when possible. Building on a previous quantitative investigation by Maldonado et al. on the removal of self-admitted technical debt (SATD), in this paper we perform an in-depth quantitative and qualitative study of how SATD is addressed in five Java open source projects. On the one hand, we look at whether SATD is "accidentally" removed, and the extent to which the SATD removal is being documented. We found that that (i) between 20% and 50% of SATD comments are accidentally removed while entire classes or methods are dropped, (ii) 8% of the SATD removal is acknowledged in commit messages, and (iii) while most of the changes addressing SATD require complex source code changes, very often SATD is addressed by specific changes to method calls or conditionals. Our results can be used to better plan TD management or learn patterns for addressing certain kinds of TD and provide recommendations to developers.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	2018 ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018
Place of Publication	New York
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages	526-536
Number of pages	11
ISBN (Print)	978-1-4503-5716-6
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196423
Publication status	Published - 28 May 2018
Event	15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2018 - Gothenburg, Sweden Duration: 28 May 2018 → 29 May 2018

Conference

Conference	15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2018
Country/Territory	Sweden
City	Gothenburg
Period	28/05/18 → 29/05/18

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10.1145/3196398.3196423

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http://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/MSR2018-Fiorella.pdf

Cite this

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title = "Was self-admitted technical debt removal a real removal?: An in-depth perspective",

abstract = "Technical Debt (TD) has been defined as {"}code being not quite right yet{"}, and its presence is often self-admitted by developers through comments. The purpose of such comments is to keep track of TD and appropriately address it when possible. Building on a previous quantitative investigation by Maldonado et al. on the removal of self-admitted technical debt (SATD), in this paper we perform an in-depth quantitative and qualitative study of how SATD is addressed in five Java open source projects. On the one hand, we look at whether SATD is {"}accidentally{"} removed, and the extent to which the SATD removal is being documented. We found that that (i) between 20% and 50% of SATD comments are accidentally removed while entire classes or methods are dropped, (ii) 8% of the SATD removal is acknowledged in commit messages, and (iii) while most of the changes addressing SATD require complex source code changes, very often SATD is addressed by specific changes to method calls or conditionals. Our results can be used to better plan TD management or learn patterns for addressing certain kinds of TD and provide recommendations to developers.",

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Zampetti, F, Serebrenik, A & Di Penta, M 2018, Was self-admitted technical debt removal a real removal? An in-depth perspective. in 2018 ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, New York, pp. 526-536, 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, 28/05/18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196423

Was self-admitted technical debt removal a real removal? An in-depth perspective. / Zampetti, Fiorella; Serebrenik, Alexander; Di Penta, Massimiliano.
2018 ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2018. p. 526-536.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

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Was self-admitted technical debt removal a real removal? An in-depth perspective

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