Links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, and source code repositories are no exception. However, despite their many undisputed benefits, links can suffer from decay, insufficient versioning, and lack of bidirectional traceability. In this paper, we investigate the role of links contained in source code comments from these perspectives. We conducted a large-scale study of around 9.6 million links to establish their prevalence, and we used a mixed-methods approach to identify the links' targets, purposes, decay, and evolutionary aspects. We found that links are prevalent in source code repositories, that licenses, software homepages, and specifications are common types of link targets, and that links are often included to provide metadata or attribution. Links are rarely updated, but many link targets evolve. Almost 10 of the links included in source code comments are dead. We then submitted a batch of link-fixing pull requests to open source software repositories, resulting in most of our fixes being merged successfully. Our findings indicate that links in source code comments can indeed be fragile, and our work opens up avenues for future work to address these problems.
Self-admitted technical debt is a commenting activity that has been well-studied in recent years @cite_20 . @cite_18 and @cite_7 studied the removal of self-admitted technical debt based on the modification of comments. Our finding of referencing bug reports for self-admitted technical debt could be another opportunity to study development activities around technical debt.
@cite_18 @cite_7 @cite_20
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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. Technical Debt (TD) has been defined as "code being not quite right yet", and its presence is often self-admitted by developers through comments. The purpose of such comments is to keep track of TD and appropriately address it when possible. Building on a previous quantitative investigation by on the removal of self-admitted technical debt (SATD), in this paper we perform an in-depth quantitative and qualitative study of how SATD is addressed in five Java open source projects. On the one hand, we look at whether SATD is "accidentally" removed, and the extent to which the SATD removal is being documented. We found that that (i) between 20 and 50 of SATD comments are accidentally removed while entire classes or methods are dropped, (ii) 8 of the SATD removal is acknowledged in commit messages, and (iii) while most of the changes addressing SATD require complex source code changes, very often SATD is addressed by specific changes to method calls or conditionals. Our results can be used to better plan TD management or learn patterns for addressing certain kinds of TD and provide recommendations to developers. Ward Cunningham in his experience report presented at the OOPSLA'92 conference introduced the metaphor of technical debt. This metaphor is related to immature, incomplete or inadequate artifacts in the software development cycle that cause higher costs and lower quality. A strategy for the technical debt management is still a challenge because its definition is not yet part of the software development process. Carolyn Seaman and Yuepu Guo proposed a technical debt management framework based on three stages. First, debts are identified and listed. After that, debts are measured by their payment efforts and then debts are selected to be considered in the software development cycle. This study evaluates the application of this framework in the real context of software projects adopting Scrum. Action research is conducted in two companies where their projects have significant technical debt. We performed three action research cycles based on the three stages of the framework for both companies. The main contribution of this paper is to provide real experiences and improvements for projects using Scrum and that may adopt the technical debt management framework proposed by Seaman and Guo. Both teams recognized that the proposed approach is feasible for being considered in the software development process after some modifications. Because of projects time constraints and ease of use, we reduced the use of the proposed metrics to two: Principal and the Current Amount of Interest. In consequence, decision-making was benefitted by the early consideration of the debts that really need to be paid. Instead of using probabilities to find the interest, these are registered every time the technical debt occurs. During the first phase, the debts identification was improved when all Scrum roles participated, while measurement and decision-making were improved when the team was responsible for these phases. The Product Owner role in both companies understood the importance of Technical Debt monitoring and prioritization during a development cycle. With these changes, the two teams mentioned they would remain using the resulting approach. Technical debt refers to the phenomena of taking shortcuts to achieve short term gain at the cost of higher maintenance efforts in the future. Recently, approaches were developed to detect technical debt through code comments, referred to as Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). Due to its importance, several studies have focused on the detection of SATD and examined its impact on software quality. However, preliminary findings showed that in some cases SATD may live in a project for a long time, i.e., more than 10 years. These findings clearly show that not all SATD may be regarded as 'bad' and some SATD needs to be removed, while other SATD may be fine to take on.Therefore, in this paper, we study the removal of SATD. In an empirical study on five open source projects, we examine how much SATD is removed and who removes SATD? We also investigate for how long SATD lives in a project and what activities lead to the removal of SATD? Our findings indicate that the majority of SATD is removed and that the majority is self-removed (i.e., removed by the same person that introduced it). Moreover, we find that SATD can last between approx. 18-172 days, on median. Finally, through a developer survey, we find that developers mostly use SATD to track future bugs and areas of the code that need improvements. Also, developers mostly remove SATD when they are fixing bugs or adding new features. Our findings contribute to the body of empirical evidence on SATD, in particular, evidence pertaining to its removal.