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International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

ICEIS 2016: Enterprise Information Systems pp 284–309Cite as

Investigating the Identification of Technical Debt Through Code Comment Analysis

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 291))

Abstract

In order to effectively manage technical debt (TD), a set of indicators has been used by automated approaches to identify TD items. However, some debt items may not be directly identified using only metrics collected from the source code. CVM-TD is a model to support the identification of technical debt by considering the developer point of view when identifying TD through code comment analysis. In this paper, we investigate the use of CVM-TD with the purpose of characterizing factors that affect the accuracy of the identification of TD, and the most chosen patterns by participants as decisive to indicate TD items. We performed a controlled experiment investigating the accuracy of CVM-TD and the influence of English skills and developer experience factors. We also investigated if the contextualized vocabulary provided by CVM-TD points to candidate comments that are considered indicators of technical debt by participants. The results indicated that CVM-TD provided promising results considering the accuracy values. English reading skills have an impact on the TD detection process. We could not conclude that the experience level affects this process. We identified a list of the 20 most chosen patterns by participants as decisive to indicate TD items. The results motivate us continuing to explore code comments in the context of TD identification process in order to improve CVM-TD.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term “TD item” represents an instance of Technical Debt.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by CNPq Universal 2014 grant 458261/2014-9. The authors also would like to thank Methanias Colaço and André Batista for their support in the execution step of the experiment.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal Institute of Sergipe, Lagarto, Sergipe, Brazil

    Mário André de Freitas Farias

  2. Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

    Mário André de Freitas Farias & Manoel Mendonça

  3. State University of Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil

    José Amâncio Santos

  4. Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Marcos Kalinowski

  5. Fraunhofer Project Center at UFBA, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

    Rodrigo Oliveira Spínola

  6. Salvador University, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

    Rodrigo Oliveira Spínola

Authors
  1. Mário André de Freitas Farias
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  2. José Amâncio Santos
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  3. Marcos Kalinowski
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  4. Manoel Mendonça
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  5. Rodrigo Oliveira Spínola
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mário André de Freitas Farias .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. MODESTE/ESEO, Angers, France

    Slimane Hammoudi

  2. Wroclaw University of Economics, Wroclaw, Poland

    Leszek A. Maciaszek

  3. ISTC-CNR, Institute of Sciences and Technologies of Cognition, Rome, Italy

    Michele M. Missikoff

  4. MODESTE/ESEO, Angers, France

    Olivier Camp

  5. EST, Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal (IPS), Setúbal, Portugal

    José Cordeiro

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de Freitas Farias, M.A., Santos, J.A., Kalinowski, M., Mendonça, M., Spínola, R.O. (2017). Investigating the Identification of Technical Debt Through Code Comment Analysis. In: Hammoudi, S., Maciaszek, L., Missikoff, M., Camp, O., Cordeiro, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 291. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62386-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62386-3_14

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62386-3

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