Wait For It: Identifying "On-Hold"Self-Admitted Technical Debt

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a qualitative study on the removal of self-admitted technical debt (SATD), and reveals a particular class of self-admitted technical debt which is amenable to automated management: ``on-hold SATD''. We define on-hold SATD as self-admitted technical 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 0.98 as well as detect the specific conditions that developers are waiting for.

Rungroj MAIPRADIT