An Exploratory Study on Self-Admitted Technical Debt

Abstract

Throughout a software development life cycle, developers knowingly commit code that is either incomplete, requires rework, produces errors, or is a temporary workaround. Such incomplete or temporary workarounds are commonly referred to as 'technical debt'. Our experience indicates that self-admitted technical debt is common in software projects and may negatively impact software maintenance, however, to date very little is known about them. Therefore, in this paper, we use source-code comments in four large open source software projects-Eclipse, Chromium OS, Apache HTTP Server, and ArgoUML to identify self-admitted technical debt. Using the identified technical debt, we study 1) the amount of self-admitted technical debt found in these projects, 2) why this self-admitted technical debt was introduced into the software projects and 3) how likely is the self-admitted technical debt to be removed after their introduction. We find that the amount of self-admitted technical debt exists in 2.4% -- 31% of the files. Furthermore, we find that developers with higher experience tend to introduce most of the self-admitted technical debt and that time pressures and complexity of the code do not correlate with the amount of self-admitted technical debt. Lastly, although self-admitted technical debt is meant to be addressed or removed in the future, only between 26.3% -- 63.5% of self-admitted technical debt gets removed from projects after introduction.