Due to limited time, budget or resources, a team is prone to introduce code that does not follow the best software development practices. This code that introduces instability in the software projects is known as Technical Debt (TD). Often, TD intentionally manifests in source code, which is known as Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). This paper presents DebtHunter, a natural language processing (NLP)- and machine learning (ML)- based approach for identifying and classifying SATD in source code comments. The proposed classification approach combines two classification phases for differentiating between the multiple debt types. Evaluations over 10 open source systems, containing more than 259k comments, showed that the approach was able to improve the performance of others in the literature. The presented approach is supported by a tool that can help developers to effectively manage SATD. The tool complements the analysis over Java source code by allowing developers to also examine the associated issue tracker. DebtHunter can be used in a continuous evolution environment to monitor the development process and make developers aware of how and where SATD is introduced, thus helping them to manage and resolve it.

Sala, I., Tommasel, A., Arcelli Fontana, F. (2021). DebtHunter: A machine learning-based approach for detecting self-admitted technical debt. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (pp.278-283). 1601 Broadway, 10th Floor, NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES : Association for Computing Machinery [10.1145/3463274.3464455].

DebtHunter: A machine learning-based approach for detecting self-admitted technical debt

Sala, I;Arcelli Fontana, F
2021

Abstract

Due to limited time, budget or resources, a team is prone to introduce code that does not follow the best software development practices. This code that introduces instability in the software projects is known as Technical Debt (TD). Often, TD intentionally manifests in source code, which is known as Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). This paper presents DebtHunter, a natural language processing (NLP)- and machine learning (ML)- based approach for identifying and classifying SATD in source code comments. The proposed classification approach combines two classification phases for differentiating between the multiple debt types. Evaluations over 10 open source systems, containing more than 259k comments, showed that the approach was able to improve the performance of others in the literature. The presented approach is supported by a tool that can help developers to effectively manage SATD. The tool complements the analysis over Java source code by allowing developers to also examine the associated issue tracker. DebtHunter can be used in a continuous evolution environment to monitor the development process and make developers aware of how and where SATD is introduced, thus helping them to manage and resolve it.
paper
Machine learning; Natural language processing; Self-admitted technical debt; Technical debt;
English
25th Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering Conference, EASE 2021
2021
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
9781450390538
2021
278
283
none
Sala, I., Tommasel, A., Arcelli Fontana, F. (2021). DebtHunter: A machine learning-based approach for detecting self-admitted technical debt. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (pp.278-283). 1601 Broadway, 10th Floor, NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES : Association for Computing Machinery [10.1145/3463274.3464455].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10281/328335
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