Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Li, Yikun
• Soliman, Mohamed
• Avgeriou, Paris
• Somers, Lou

Titel

Self-Admitted Technical Debt in the Embedded Systems Industry: An Exploratory Case Study

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on software engineering, 2023-04, Vol.49 (4), p.2545-2565

Ort / Verlag

New York: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

• IEEE_Xplore

Quelle

IEEE Xplore (IEEE/IET Electronic Library - IEL)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Technical debt denotes shortcuts taken during software development, mostly for the sake of expedience. When such shortcuts are admitted explicitly by developers (e.g., writing a TODO/Fixme comment), they are termed as Self-Admitted Technical Debt or SATD . There has been a fair amount of work studying SATD management in Open Source projects, but SATD in industry is relatively unexplored. At the same time, there is no work focusing on developers' perspectives towards SATD and its management. To address this, we conducted an exploratory case study in cooperation with an industrial partner to study how they think of SATD and how they manage it. Specifically, we collected data by identifying and characterizing SATD in different sources (issues, source code comments, and commits) and carried out a series of interviews with 12 software practitioners. The results show: 1) the core characteristics of SATD in industrial projects; 2) developers' attitudes towards identified SATD and statistics; 3) triggers for practitioners to introduce and repay SATD; 4) relations between SATD in different sources; 5) practices used to manage SATD; 6) challenges and tooling ideas for SATD management.