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arXiv · 2408.15109

Comments or Issues: Where to Document Technical Debt?

Laerte Xavier·João Eduardo Montandon·Marco Tulio Valente
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Abstract

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a form of Technical Debt where developers document the debt using source code comments (SATD-C) or issues (SATD-I). However, it is still unclear the circumstances that drive developers to choose one or another. In this paper, we survey authors of both types of debts using a large-scale dataset containing 74K SATD-C and 20K SATD-I instances, extracted from 190 GitHub projects. As a result, we provide 13 guidelines to support developers to decide when to use comments or issues to report Technical Debt.

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Laerte Xavier, João Eduardo Montandon, Marco Tulio Valente. 2024-08-27. Comments or Issues: Where to Document Technical Debt?. https://doi.org/10.1109/ms.2022.3170825

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