TY - GEN
T1 - Refactoring Debt
T2 - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
AU - Peruma, Anthony
AU - Alomar, Eman Abdullah
AU - Newman, Christian D.
AU - Mkaouer, Mohamed Wiem
AU - Ouni, Ali
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/10/17
Y1 - 2022/10/17
N2 - To meet project timelines or budget constraints, developers intentionally deviate from writing optimal code to feasible code in what is known as incurring Technical Debt (TD). Furthermore, as part of planning their correction, developers document these deficiencies as comments in the code (i.e., self-admitted technical debt or SATD). As a means of improving source code quality, developers often apply a series of refactoring operations to their codebase. In this study, we explore developers repaying this debt through refactoring operations by examining occurrences of SATD removal in the code of 76 open-source Java systems. Our findings show that TD payment usually occurs with refactoring activities and developers refactor their code to remove TD for specific reasons. We envision our findings supporting vendors in providing tools to better support developers in the automatic repayment of technical debt.
AB - To meet project timelines or budget constraints, developers intentionally deviate from writing optimal code to feasible code in what is known as incurring Technical Debt (TD). Furthermore, as part of planning their correction, developers document these deficiencies as comments in the code (i.e., self-admitted technical debt or SATD). As a means of improving source code quality, developers often apply a series of refactoring operations to their codebase. In this study, we explore developers repaying this debt through refactoring operations by examining occurrences of SATD removal in the code of 76 open-source Java systems. Our findings show that TD payment usually occurs with refactoring activities and developers refactor their code to remove TD for specific reasons. We envision our findings supporting vendors in providing tools to better support developers in the automatic repayment of technical debt.
KW - Mining Software Repositories
KW - Refactoring
KW - Self Admitted Technical Debt
KW - Technical Debt
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85134067292
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85134067292&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3524842.3528527
DO - 10.1145/3524842.3528527
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85134067292
T3 - Proceedings - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
SP - 127
EP - 131
BT - Proceedings - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
Y2 - 23 May 2022 through 24 May 2022
ER -