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Technical debt describes situations where developers write less-than-optimal code to meet project milestones. However, this debt accumulation often results in future developer effort to live with or fix these quality issues. To better…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Gregory Wilder , Riley Miyamoto , Samuel Watson , Rick Kazman , Anthony Peruma

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…

Static Analysis Tools (SATs) are central to security engineering activities, as they enable early identification of code weaknesses without requiring execution. However, their effectiveness is often limited by high false-positive rates and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Nicolás E. Díaz Ferreyra , Moritz Mock , Max Kretschmann , Barbara Russo , Mojtaba Shahin , Mansooreh Zahedi , Riccardo Scandariato

When developers use different keywords such as TODO and FIXME in source code comments to describe self-admitted technical debt (SATD), we refer it as Keyword-Labeled SATD (KL-SATD). We study KL-SATD from 33 software repositories with 13,588…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-08-13 Leevi Rantala , Mika Mäntylä , David Lo

Technical debt, specifically Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD), remains a significant challenge for software developers and managers due to its potential to adversely affect long-term software maintainability. Although various approaches…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Yikun Li , Mohamed Soliman , Paris Avgeriou , Maarten van Ittersum

Keeping track of and managing Self-Admitted Technical Debts (SATDs) is important for maintaining a healthy software project. Current active-learning SATD recognition tool involves manual inspection of 24% of the test comments on average to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Huy Tu , Tim Menzies

Technical debt refers to suboptimal code that degrades software quality. When developers intentionally introduce such debt, it is called self-admitted technical debt (SATD). Since SATD hinders maintenance, identifying its categories is key…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Sota Nakashima , Yuta Ishimoto , Masanari Kondo , Tao Xiao , Yasutaka Kamei

Context: Previous studies demonstrate that Machine or Deep Learning (ML/DL) models can detect Technical Debt from source code comments called Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). Despite the importance of ML/DL in software development,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Emmanuel Iko-Ojo Simon , Chirath Hettiarachchi , Alex Potanin , Hanna Suominen , Fatemeh Fard

Self-admitted technical debt refers to situations where a software developer knows that their current implementation is not optimal and indicates this using a source code comment. In this work, we hypothesize that it is possible to develop…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Rungroj Maipradit , Christoph Treude , Hideaki Hata , Kenichi Matsumoto

Multi-task learning is a paradigm that leverages information from related tasks to improve the performance of machine learning. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) are comments in the code that indicate not-quite-right code introduced for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Barbara Russo , Jorge Melegati , Moritz Mock

Speeding up development may produce technical debt, i.e., not-quite-right code for which the effort to make it right increases with time as a sort of interest. Developers may be aware of the debt as they admit it in their code comments.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Barbara Russo , Matteo Camilli , Moritz Mock

In software engineering, technical debt, signifying the compromise between short-term expediency and long-term maintainability, is being addressed by researchers through various machine learning approaches. This study seeks to provide a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Eric L. Melin , Nasir U. Eisty

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have witnessed rapid, significant improvements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Utilizing Deep Learning, researchers have taken advantage of repository comments in Software Engineering…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-20 William Aiken , Paul K. Mvula , Paula Branco , Guy-Vincent Jourdan , Mehrdad Sabetzadeh , Herna Viktor

Context: Previous research on software aging is limited with focus on dynamic runtime indicators like memory and performance, often neglecting evolutionary indicators like source code comments and narrowly examining legacy issues within the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Murali Sridharan , Mika Mäntylä , Leevi Rantala

Technical Debt (TD) refers to the situation where developers make trade-offs to achieve short-term goals at the expense of long-term code quality, which can have a negative impact on the quality of software systems. In the context of code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Liming Fu , Peng Liang , Zeeshan Rasheed , Zengyang Li , Amjed Tahir , Xiaofeng Han

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD), cases where developers intentionally acknowledge suboptimal solutions in code through comments, poses a significant challenge to software maintainability. Left unresolved, SATD can degrade code quality…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Mohammad Sadegh Sheikhaei , Yuan Tian , Shaowei Wang , Bowen Xu

A high imbalance exists between technical debt and non-technical debt source code comments. Such imbalance affects Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) detection performance, and existing literature lacks empirical evidence on the choice of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Murali Sridharan , Mika Mantyla , Leevi Rantala , Maelick Claes

Most Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) research utilizes explicit SATD features such as 'TODO' and 'FIXME' for SATD detection. A closer look reveals several SATD research uses simple SATD ('Easy to Find') code comments without the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-14 Murali Sridharan , Leevi Rantala , Mika Mäntylä

To meet project timelines or budget constraints, developers intentionally deviate from writing optimal code to feasible code in what is known as incurring Technical Debt (TD). Furthermore, as part of planning their correction, developers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Anthony Peruma , Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Christian D. Newman , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

To complete tasks faster, developers often have to sacrifice the quality of the software. Such compromised practice results in the increasing burden to developers in future development. The metaphor, technical debt, describes such practice.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Jiakun Liu , Qiao Huang , Xin Xia , Emad Shihab , David Lo , Shanping Li