Automated Self-Admitted Technical Debt Tracking at Commit-Level: A Language-independent Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".