Toward prioritization of self-admitted technical debt: an approach to support decision to payment

Abstract

Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor that describes the cost–benefit relationship between postponing technical development activities and the consequences of this long-term postponement. The lack of TD Management compromises the Software’s internal quality. It makes its maintenance complex and costly. TD instances are called Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) when intentionally committed and documented through comments in the source code. Several studies explore the identification of SATD, but approaches to support the payment stage are lacking, particularly approaches to indicate which SATD priority for payment. This paper presents an approach to support the prioritization activity in SATD payment. The Prioritization Approach focuses on creating associations between SATD associations and problems found in the source code, identified by Automatic Static Analysis. The results demonstrate that using the issues found on source code and SATD description (found in comments) has greater precision to establish the priority among the SATD compared to the SATD description on comments. We applied the approach proposed to different software projects, and the results support developers’ prioritization.