Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept to describe the self-documented addition of technical debt to a software project in the form of source code comments. SATD can linger in projects and degrade source-code quality, but it can also be more visible than unintentionally added or undocumented technical debt. Understanding the implications of adding SATD to a software project is important because developers can benefit from a better understanding of the quality trade-offs they are making. However, empirical studies, analyzing the survivability and removal of SATD comments, are challenged by potential code changes or SATD comment updates that may interfere with properly tracking their appearance, existence, and removal. In this paper, we propose SATDBailiff, a tool that uses an existing state-of-the-art SATD detection tool, to identify SATD in method comments, then properly track their lifespan. SATDBailiff is given as input links to open source projects, and its output is a list of all identified SATDs, and for each detected SATD, SATDBailiff reports all its associated changes, including any updates to its text, all the way to reporting its removal. The goal of SATDBailiff is to aid researchers and practitioners in better tracking SATDs instances and providing them with a reliable tool that can be easily extended. SATDBailiff was validated using a dataset of previously detected and manually validated SATD instances. SATDBailiff is publicly available as an open-source, along with the manual analysis of SATD instances associated with its validation, on the project website
翻译:自我承认的技术债务(SATD)是一个隐喻的概念,用来以源码注释的形式描述软件项目中技术债务的自证其增加情况。 SATD可以留在项目中,降低源码质量,但也可以比无意增加或无证技术债务更加明显。 理解将SATD添加到软件项目中的影响很重要,因为开发者可以更好地了解他们正在作出的质量权衡,因为通过经验研究,分析SATD评论的可生存性和删除性,受到潜在代码修改或SATD评论更新的挑战,这可能干扰适当跟踪其外观、存在和删除。在本文件中,我们提议SSATDBailiff,这是一个使用现有最先进的SATD检测工具,在方法评论中识别SATD,然后正确跟踪其寿命。 SAT数据库作为公开源项目的投入链接,其产出是所有已查明的SATDTD的可生存性和删除性清单,SATDbailiff报告其所有相关变化,包括对其文本的任何更新,所有方式都能够报告其数据库中的最新数据,在SDB数据库中提供更好的数据验证。