FixMe: A GitHub Bot for Detecting and Monitoring On-Hold Self-Admitted Technical Debt

TL;DR

This paper introduces FixMe, a GitHub bot that automatically detects on-hold self-admitted technical debt comments in code, monitors related issues, and notifies developers when the debt can be addressed, improving maintenance efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel machine learning-based GitHub bot that detects on-hold SATD, links it to issues, and automates notifications, aiding developers in technical debt management.

Findings

FixMe effectively detects on-hold SATD comments.

The bot successfully monitors issue resolution status.

Participants found FixMe helpful in managing technical debt.

Abstract

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 suspend proper implementation due to issues reported inside or outside the project. When the referenced issues are resolved, the On-hold SATD also need to be addressed, but since monitoring these issue reports takes a lot of time and effort, developers may not be aware of the resolved issues and leave the On-hold SATD in the code. In this paper, we propose FixMe, a GitHub bot that helps developers detecting and monitoring On-hold SATD in their repositories and notify them whenever the On-hold SATDs are ready to be fixed (i.e. the referenced issues are resolved). The bot can automatically detect On-hold SATD comments from source code using machine learning techniques and discover referenced issues. When the referenced issues are resolved, developers will be notified by FixMe bot. The evaluation conducted with 11 participants shows that our FixMe bot can support them in dealing with On-hold SATD. FixMe is available at https://www.fixmebot.app/ and FixMe's VDO is at https://youtu.be/YSz9kFxN_YQ.