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Empirical Software Engineering
Published in: Empirical Software Engineering 6/2021

01-11-2021

Self-admitted technical debt practices: a comparison between industry and open-source

Authors: Fiorella Zampetti, Gianmarco Fucci, Alexander Serebrenik, Massimiliano Di Penta

Published in: Empirical Software Engineering | Issue 6/2021

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Abstract

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) consists of annotations, left by developers as comments in the source code or elsewhere, as a reminder about pieces of software manifesting technical debt (TD), i.e., “not being ready yet”. While previous studies have investigated SATD management and its relationship with software quality, there is little understanding of the extent and circumstances to which developers admit TD. This paper reports the results of a study in which we asked developers from industry and open-source about their practices in annotating source code and other artifacts for self-admitting TD. The study consists of two phases. First, we conducted 10 interviews to gather a first understanding of the phenomenon and to prepare a survey questionnaire. Then, we surveyed 52 industrial developers as well as 49 contributors to open-source projects. Results of the study show how the TD annotation practices, as well as the typical content of SATD comments, are very similar between open-source and industry. At the same time, our results highlight how, while open-source code is spread of comments admitting the need for improvements, SATD in industry may be dictated by organizational guidelines but, at the same time, implicitly discouraged by the fear of admitting responsibilities. Results also highlight the need for tools helping developers to achieve a better TD awareness.
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Footnotes
1
See, e.g., the “Todo Comments Considered Harmful” http://​wiki.​c2.​com/​?​TodoCommentsCons​ideredHarmful vs. “Todo Comments Considered Useful” http://​wiki.​c2.​com/​?​TodoCommentsCons​ideredUseful.
 
2
No participant, nor any potential participant reported us to have any particular privacy concern about this channel.
 
3
The sum exceeds the number of interviewees as multiple IDEs and programming languages may be used.
 
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Metadata
Title
Self-admitted technical debt practices: a comparison between industry and open-source
Authors
Fiorella Zampetti
Gianmarco Fucci
Alexander Serebrenik
Massimiliano Di Penta
Publication date
01-11-2021
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Empirical Software Engineering / Issue 6/2021
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10031-3

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