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Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) refers to instances where developers knowingly introduce suboptimal solutions into code and document them, often through textual artifacts. This paper provides a comprehensive state-of-practice report on…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Edi Sutoyo , Andrea Capiluppi

Technical debt refers to the consequences of sub-optimal decisions made during software development that prioritize short-term benefits over long-term maintainability. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a specific form of technical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yikun Li , Mohamed Soliman , Paris Avgeriou , Jie Tan , Jiakun Liu

The development of Machine Learning (ML)- and, more recently, of Deep Learning (DL)-intensive systems requires suitable choices, e.g., in terms of technology, algorithms, and hyper-parameters. Such choices depend on developers' experience,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Federica Pepe , Fiorella Zampetti , Antonio Mastropaolo , Gabriele Bavota , Massimiliano Di Penta

Context: Technical debt (TD) is a widely studied metaphor that helps to explain how sub-optimal decisions that can harm software maintainability over time. Although incurring TD is not intrinsically bad, tracking and managing TD are crucial…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-29 João Paulo Biazotto , Daniel Feitosa , Paris Avgeriou , Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

Technical Debt is a term begat by Ward Cunningham to signify the measure of adjust required to put a software into that state which it ought to have had from the earliest starting point. Often organizations need to support continuous and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Nikhil Oswal

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept to describe the self-documented addition of technical debt to a software project in the form of source code comments. SATD can linger in projects and degrade source-code quality,…

As large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and Gemini become integrated into software development workflows, developers increasingly leave traces of AI involvement in their code comments. Among these, some comments…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Abdullah Al Mujahid , Mia Mohammad Imran

The emergence of open-source ML libraries such as TensorFlow and Google Auto ML has enabled developers to harness state-of-the-art ML algorithms with minimal overhead. However, during this accelerated ML development process, said developers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Aaditya Bhatia , Foutse Khomh , Bram Adams , Ahmed E Hassan

In the process of software evolution, developers often sacrifice the long-term code quality to satisfy the short-term goals due to specific reasons, which is called technical debt. In particular, self-admitted technical debt (SATD) refers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Zhaoqiang Guo , Shiran Liu , Jinping Liu , Yanhui Li , Lin Chen , Hongmin Lu , Yuming Zhou , Baowen Xu

Developers sometimes choose design and implementation shortcuts due to the pressure from tight release schedules. However, shortcuts introduce technical debt that increases as the software evolves. The debt needs to be repaid as fast as…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Biruk Asmare Muse , Csaba Nagy , Anthony Cleve , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

Technical debt is a metaphor used to convey the idea that doing things in a "quick and dirty" way when designing and constructing a software leads to a situation where one incurs more and more deferred future expenses. Similarly to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-04-03 Alvine Boaye Belle

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) refers to technical debt that is intentionally introduced by developers and explicitly documented in code comments or other software artifacts (e.g., issue reports) to annotate sub-optimal decisions made…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Jerin Yasmin , Mohammad Sadegh Sheikhaei , Yuan Tian

Upon evolving their software, organizations and individual developers have to spend a substantial effort to pay back technical debt, i.e., the fact that software is released in a shape not as good as it should be, e.g., in terms of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Antonio Mastropaolo , Massimiliano Di Penta , Gabriele Bavota

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) refers to a form of technical debt in which developers explicitly acknowledge and document the existence of technical shortcuts, workarounds, or temporary solutions within the codebase. Over recent years,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Edi Sutoyo , Andrea Capiluppi

Software and systems traceability is essential for downstream tasks such as data-driven software analysis and intelligent tool development. However, despite the increasing attention to mining and understanding technical debt in software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Mohammad Sadegh Sheikhaei , Yuan Tian

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) encompasses a wide array of sub-optimal design and implementation choices reported in software artefacts (e.g., code comments and commit messages) by developers themselves. Such reports have been central…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Nicolás E. Díaz Ferreyra , Mojtaba Shahin , Mansooreh Zahedi , Sodiq Quadri , Ricardo Scandariato

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD), referring to comments flagged by developers that explicitly acknowledge suboptimal code or incomplete functionality, has received extensive attention in machine learning (ML) and traditional (Non-ML)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Niruthiha Selvanayagam , Taher A. Ghaleb , Manel Abdellatif

The impact of Technical Debt (TD) on software maintenance and evolution is of great concern, but recent evidence shows that a considerable amount of TD is fixed by the same developers who introduced it; this is termed self-fixed TD. This…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Jie Tan , Daniel Feitosa , Paris Avgeriou

Context: Technical Debt (TD) can be paid back either by those that incurred it or by others. We call the former self-fixed TD, and it can be particularly effective, as developers are experts in their own code and are well-suited to fix the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Jie Tan , Daniel Feitosa , Paris Avgeriou

Self-Admitted Technical Debt, or SATD, is a self-admission of technical debt present in a software system. To effectively manage SATD, developers need to estimate its priority and assess the effort required to fix the described technical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Nathan Cassee , Neil Ernst , Nicole Novielli , Alexander Serebrenik