TechDebt 2023
Sun 14 - Mon 15 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia
co-located with ICSE 2023
Mon 15 May 2023 11:00 - 11:25 at Meeting Room 101 - Maintenance of Technical Debt

Background: Technical Debt (TD) needs to be controlled and tracked during software development. Support to automatically track TD in issue trackers is limited. Aim: We explore the usage of a large dataset of developer-labeled TD issues in combination with cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to automatically classify TD in issue trackers. Method: We mine and analyze more than 160GB of textual data from GitHub projects, collecting over 55,600 TD issues and consolidating them into a large dataset (GTD dataset). We use such datasets to train and test Transformer ML models. Then we test the model’s generalization ability by testing them on six unseen projects. Finally, we re-train the models including part of the TD issues from the target project to test their adaptability. Results and conclusion: (i) We create and release the GTD dataset, a comprehensive dataset including TD issues from 6,401 public repositories with various contexts; (ii) By training Transformers using the GTD dataset, we achieve performance metrics that are promising; (iii) Our results are a significant step forward towards supporting the automatic classification of TD in issue trackers, especially when the models are adapted to the context of unseen projects after fine tuning.

Mon 15 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

11:00 - 12:30
Maintenance of Technical DebtPlenary / Technical Papers at Meeting Room 101
11:00
25m
Research paper
Technical Debt Classification in Issue Trackers using Natural Language Processing based on Transformers
Technical Papers
Daniel Skryseth University of Oslo, Karthik Shivashankar University of Oslo, Ildikó Pilán Norwegian Computing Center, Antonio Martini University of Oslo, Norway
11:25
25m
Research paper
Exploring the Effect of Various Maintenance Activities on the Accumulation of TD Principal
Technical Papers
Nikolaos Nikolaidis University of Macedonia, Apostolos Ampatzoglou University of Macedonia, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou University of Macedonia, Nikolaos Mittas International Hellenic University, Evdokimos Konstantinidis Aristotle University, Panagiotis Bamidis Aristotle University
11:50
40m
Live Q&A
Open Q&A
Plenary