Automated Self-Admitted Technical Debt Tracking at Commit-Level: A Language-independent Approach
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 systems, specific tools for supporting the track of technical debts are rarely available. In this work, we propose the first programming language-independent tracking tool for self-admitted technical debt (SATD) – a sub-optimal solution that is explicitly annotated by developers in software systems. Our approach takes a git repository as input and returns a list of SATDs with their evolution actions (created, deleted, updated) at the commit-level. Our approach also returns a line number indicating the latest starting position of the corresponding SATD in the system. Our SATD tracking approach first identifies an initial set of raw SATDs (which only have created and deleted actions) by detecting and tracking SATDs in commits’ hunks, leveraging a state-of-the-art language-independent SATD detection approach. Then it calculates a context-based matching score between pairs of deleted and created raw SATDs in the same commits to identify SATD update actions. The results of our preliminary study on Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant show that our tracking tool can achieve a F1 score of 92.8% and 96.7% respectively.
Sun 14 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
11:00 - 12:30 | |||
11:00 25mResearch paper | An Exploratory Study on the Occurrence of Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Android Apps Technical Papers Gregory Wilder II University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Riley Miyamoto University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Samuel Watson University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Rick Kazman University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Anthony Peruma University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Pre-print | ||
11:25 25mResearch paper | Automatically Identifying Relations Between Self-Admitted Technical Debt Across Different Sources Technical Papers Yikun Li University of Groningen, Mohamed Soliman University of Groningen, Paris Avgeriou Univ. of Gronningen | ||
11:50 15mShort-paper | Automated Self-Admitted Technical Debt Tracking at Commit-Level: A Language-independent Approach Short Papers Mohammad Sadegh Sheikhaei School of Computing, Queen's University, Yuan Tian Queens University, Kingston, Canada Pre-print | ||
12:05 15mShort-paper | Measuring Improvement of F1-Scores in Detection of Self-Admitted Technical Debt Short Papers William Aiken University of Ottawa, Paul K. Mvula University of Ottawa, Paula Branco University of Ottawa, Guy Jourdan University of Ottawa, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh University of Ottawa, Herna Viktor University of Ottawa Pre-print | ||
12:20 10mLive Q&A | Open Q&A Plenary |