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Related papers: PromptDebt: A Comprehensive Study of Technical Deb…

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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

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

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

Developers often leave behind clues in their code, admitting where it falls short, known as Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). In the world of Scientific Software (SSW), where innovation moves fast and collaboration is key, such debt is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Eric L. Melin , Ahmed Musa Awon , Nasir U. Eisty , Neil A. Ernst , Shurui Zhou

Community smells reflect poor organizational practices that often lead to socio-technical issues and the accumulation of Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). While prior studies have explored these problems in general software systems,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Shamse Tasnim Cynthia , Nuri Almarimi , Banani Roy

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

Technical Debt is a metaphor used to describe the situation in which long-term software artifact quality is traded for short-term goals in software projects. In recent years, the concept of self-admitted technical debt (SATD) was proposed,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Tao Xiao , Dong Wang , Shane McIntosh , Hideaki Hata , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Takashi Ishio , Kenichi Matsumoto

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

Technical Debt occurs when development teams favour short-term operability over long-term stability. Since this places software maintainability at risk, technical debt requires early attention to avoid paying for accumulated interest. Most…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Abdulaziz Alhefdhi , Hoa Khanh Dam , Yusuf Sulistyo Nugroho , Hideaki Hata , Takashi Ishio , Aditya Ghose

Security vulnerabilities are increasingly prevalent in modern software and they are widely consequential to our society. Various approaches to defending against these vulnerabilities have been proposed, among which those leveraging deep…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Yu Nong , Mohammed Aldeen , Long Cheng , Hongxin Hu , Feng Chen , Haipeng Cai

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

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

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

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

As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition from code completion tools to autonomous system architects, their impact on long-term software maintainability remains unquantified. While existing research benchmarks functional correctness…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Tyler Slater

AI coding assistants are now widely used in software development. Software developers increasingly integrate AI-generated code into their codebases to improve productivity. Prior studies have shown that AI-generated code may contain code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yue Liu , Ratnadira Widyasari , Yanjie Zhao , Ivana Clairine Irsan , Junkai Chen , David Lo

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become key components of modern software, with prompts acting as their de-facto programming interface. However, prompt design remains largely empirical and small mistakes can cascade into unreliable,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Haoye Tian , Chong Wang , BoYang Yang , Lyuye Zhang , Yang Liu

A growing variety of prompt engineering techniques has been proposed for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet systematic evaluation of each technique on individual software engineering (SE) tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we…