MSR 2020
Mon 29 - Tue 30 June 2020
co-located with ICSE 2020
Tue 30 Jun 2020 11:00 - 11:12 at MSR:Zoom - Quality Chair(s): Jens Krinke

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) is a particular case of Technical Debt (TD) where developers explicitly acknowledge their sub-optimal implementation decisions. Previous studies mine SATD by searching for specific TD-related terms in source code comments. By contrast, in this paper we argue that developers can admit technical debt by other means, e.g., by creating issues in tracking systems and labelling them as referring to TD. We refer to this type of SATD as issue-based SATD or just SATD-I. We study a sample of 286 SATD-I instances collected from five open source projects, including Microsoft Visual Studio and GitLab Community Edition. We show that only 29% of the studied SATD-I instances can be tracked to source code comments. We also show that SATD-I issues take more time to be closed, compared to other issues, although they are not more complex in terms of code churn. Besides, in 45% of the studied issues TD was introduced to ship earlier, and in almost 60% it refers to Design flaws. Finally, we report that most developers pay SATD-I to reduce its costs or interests (66%). Our findings suggest that there is space for designing novel tools to support technical debt management, particularly tools that encourage developers to create and label issues containing TD concerns.

Tue 30 Jun

Displayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change

11:00 - 12:00
QualityTechnical Papers / Registered Reports / Keynote / MSR Awards / FOSS Award / Education / Data Showcase / Mining Challenge / MSR Challenge Proposals / Ask Me Anything at MSR:Zoom
Chair(s): Jens Krinke University College London

Q/A & Discussion of Session Papers over Zoom (Joining info available on Slack)

11:00
12m
Live Q&A
Beyond the Code: Mining Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Issue Tracker SystemsMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Laerte Xavier Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Fabio da Silva Ferreira , Rodrigo Brito , Marco Tulio Valente Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Pre-print Media Attached
11:12
12m
Live Q&A
An Empirical Study on Regular Expression BugsMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Peipei Wang North Carolina State University, USA, Chris Brown North Carolina State University, Jamie Jennings North Carolina State University, Kathryn Stolee North Carolina State University
Pre-print Media Attached
11:24
12m
Live Q&A
Do Explicit Review Strategies Improve Code Review Performance?MSR - Registered Reports
Registered Reports
A: Pavlína Wurzel Gonçalves , A: Enrico Fregnan , A: Tobias Baum , A: Kurt Schneider Leibniz Universität Hannover, Software Engineering Group, A: Alberto Bacchelli University of Zurich
Pre-print Media Attached
11:36
12m
Live Q&A
SoftMon: A Tool to Compare Similar Open-source Software from a Performance PerspectiveMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Pre-print Media Attached
11:48
12m
Live Q&A
A Study of Potential Code Borrowing and License Violations in Java Projects on GitHubMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Yaroslav Golubev JetBrains Research, ITMO University, Maria Eliseeva , Nikita Povarov JetBrains, Timofey Bryksin JetBrains Research, Saint Petersburg State University
Pre-print Media Attached