Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a form of Technical Debt where developers document the debt using source code comments (SATD-C) or issues (SATD-I). However, it is still unclear the circumstances that drive developers to choose one or another. In this paper, we survey authors of both types of debts using a large-scale dataset containing 74K SATD-C and 20K SATD-I instances, extracted from 190 GitHub projects. As a result, we provide 13 guidelines to support developers to decide when to use comments or issues to report Technical Debt.
@article{arxiv.2408.15109,
title = {Comments or Issues: Where to Document Technical Debt?},
author = {Laerte Xavier and João Eduardo Montandon and Marco Tulio Valente},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.15109},
year = {2024}
}