Wait For It: Identifying "On-Hold" Self-Admitted Technical Debt

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated classifier to identify 'on-hold' self-admitted technical debt comments in code, enabling better management of technical debt by detecting when issues are ready for resolution.

Contribution

It presents the first automated approach to detect 'on-hold' self-admitted technical debt comments and their conditions, aiding developers in managing technical debt more effectively.

Findings

Classifier achieves an AUC of 0.83 in identifying 'on-hold' comments.

Automated detection of specific conditions developers wait for is feasible.

First step towards tool support for managing self-admitted technical debt.

Abstract

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 automated techniques to understand a subset of these comments in more detail, and to propose tool support that can help developers manage self-admitted technical debt more effectively. Based on a qualitative study of 335 comments indicating self-admitted technical debt, we first identify one particular class of debt amenable to automated management: "on-hold" self-admitted technical debt, i.e., debt which contains a condition to indicate that a developer is waiting for a certain event or an updated functionality having been implemented elsewhere. We then design and evaluate an automated classifier which can identify these "on-hold" instances with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.83 as well as detect the specific conditions that developers are waiting for. Our work presents a first step towards automated tool support that is able to indicate when certain instances of self-admitted technical debt are ready to be addressed.