Identification and Remediation of Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Issue Trackers

TL;DR

This study investigates self-admitted technical debt in issue trackers, categorizing types, timing, and repayment patterns, revealing that most technical debt is addressed by its creators within a median of around 872 hours.

Contribution

It is the first detailed analysis of SATD in issue trackers, identifying types, timing, and repayment behaviors, expanding understanding beyond source code comments.

Findings

Eight types of technical debt identified in issues.

Most technical debt is paid off, mainly by its creators.

Median time to repay technical debt is approximately 872 hours.

Abstract

Technical debt refers to taking shortcuts to achieve short-term goals, which might negatively influence software maintenance in the long-term. There is increasing attention on technical debt that is admitted by developers in source code comments (termed as self-admitted technical debt or SATD). But SATD in issue trackers is relatively unexplored. We performed a case study, where we manually examined 500 issues from two open source projects (i.e. Hadoop and Camel), which contained 152 SATD items. We found that: 1) eight types of technical debt are identified in issues, namely architecture, build, code, defect, design, documentation, requirement, and test debt; 2) developers identify technical debt in issues in three different points in time, and a small part is identified by its creators; 3) the majority of technical debt is paid off, 4) mostly by those who identified it or created it; 5) the median time and average time to repay technical debt are 872.3 and 25.0 hours respectively.