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Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Jifeng Xuan , Yan Hu , He Jiang

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

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

The rapid adoption of Deep Learning (DL)-enabled systems has revolutionized software development, driving innovation across various domains. However, these systems also introduce unique challenges, particularly in maintaining software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Gilberto Recupito , Vincenzo De Martino , Dario Di Nucci , Fabio Palomba

Technical debt (TD) refers to suboptimal choices during software development that achieve short-term goals at the expense of long-term quality. Although developers often informally discuss TD, the concept has not yet crystalized into a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Ipek Ozkaya , Zachary Kurtz , Robert L. Nord , Raghvinder S. Sangwan , Satish M. Srinivasan

Context: Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) occurs when developers acknowledge shortcuts in code. In scientific software (SSW), such debt poses unique risks to the validity and reproducibility of results. Objective: This study aims to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Eric L. Melin , Nasir U. Eisty , Gregory Watson , Addi Malviya-Thakur

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

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian D. Newman , Ali Ouni

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) refers to technical compromises explicitly admitted by developers in natural language artifacts such as code comments, commit messages, and issue trackers. Among its types, Architecture Technical Debt…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Edi Sutoyo , Paris Avgeriou , 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

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

Context: Technical Debt is a metaphor used to describe code that is "not quite right." Although TD studies have gained momentum, TD has yet to be studied as thoroughly in non-Object-Oriented (OO) or scientific software such as R. R is a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Zadia Codabux , Melina Vidoni , Fatemeh H. 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

Existing software tools enable characterizing and measuring the amount of technical debt at selective granularity levels. In this paper we aim to study the evolution and characteristics of technical debt in open-source software. We carry…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Arthur-Jozsef Molnar , Simona Motogna

Self-Admitted Technical Debt or SATD can be found in various sources, such as source code comments, commit messages, issue tracking systems, and pull requests. Previous research has established the existence of relations between SATD items…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Yikun Li , Mohamed Soliman , Paris Avgeriou

Research software (also called scientific software) is essential for advancing scientific endeavours. Research software encapsulates complex algorithms and domain-specific knowledge and is a fundamental component of all science. A pervasive…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Neil A. Ernst , Ahmed Musa Awon , Swapnil Hingmire , Ze Shi Li

Background: Technical Debt (TD) describes suboptimal software development practices with long-term consequences, such as defects and vulnerabilities. Deadlines are a leading cause of the emergence of TD in software systems. While multiple…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Joshua Aldrich Edbert , Zadia Codabux , Roberto Verdecchia

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

Technical Debt, considered by many to be the 'silent killer' of software projects, has undeniably become part of the everyday vocabulary of software engineers. We know it compromises the internal quality of a system, either deliberately or…

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