Identification and Remediation of Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Issue Trackers

Technical debt refers to taking shortcuts to achieve short-term goals, which might negatively influence software maintenance in the long-term. There is increasing attention on technical debt that is admitted by developers in source code comments (termed as self-admitted technical debt or SATD). But SATD in issue trackers is relatively unexplored. We performed a case study, where we manually examined 500 issues from two open source projects (i.e. Hadoop and Camel), which contained 152 SATD items. We found that: 1) eight types of technical debt are identified in issues, namely architecture, build, code, defect, design, documentation, requirement, and test debt; 2) developers identify technical debt in issues in three different points in time, and a small part is identified by its creators; 3) the majority of technical debt is paid off, 4) mostly by those who identified it or created it; 5) the median time and average time to repay technical debt are 872.3 and 25.0 hours respectively.