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Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD), a concept that highlights sub-optimal choices in software development documented in code comments or other project resources, poses challenges to the maintainability and evolution of software systems. Recognizing the importance of managing SATD to mitigate its detrimental impact on software quality and maintainability, this thesis focuses on four essential aspects of SATD management: (1) SATD identification and classification—detecting SATD instances in code comments and classifying them; (2) SATD tracking—identifying SATD occurrences in repositories and tracking them through commits until their removal or latest recorded location; (3) Automated SATD repayment—addressing SATD automatically through code generation; and (4) An empirical study of SATD across programming languages to analyze its prevalence, deletion ratio, lifespan, and other characteristics.
For SATD identification and classification, we investigate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) across different settings, including in-context learning (ICL), fine-tuning, LLM size, and the impact of providing contextual information, such as surrounding code.
For SATD tracking, we develop the first programming language-independent tracking tool, facilitating the precise monitoring of SATD lifecycles and aiding in the accurate analysis of SATD repayment practices.
We study the effectiveness of LLMs in automated SATD repayment by creating the largest SATD repayment datasets ever assembled (58,722 items for Python and 97,347 items for Java) and introducing three new, effective evaluation metrics: BLEU-diff, CrystalBLEU-diff, and LEMOD. Using our new benchmarks and evaluation metrics, we evaluate two types of automated SATD repayment methods: fine-tuning smaller models, and prompt engineering with five large-scale models.
Finally, we conduct an empirical study of SATD across three popular programming languages. Leveraging our SATD Tracker, we processed 13,693 Python repositories, 7,659 Java repositories, and 11,203 JavaScript repositories, extracting the largest SATD datasets ever created for these languages. We analyze these datasets to compare the characteristics of SATD across programming languages and repository sizes.
This thesis advances the field of SATD management by introducing innovative methods for SATD identification, tracking, automated repayment, and empirical analysis, providing valuable insights and tools to improve software maintainability and quality across diverse programming languages.