Self-admitted technical debt refers to situations where a software developer knows that their current implementation is not optimal and indicates this using a source code comment. In this work, we hypothesize that it is possible to develop automated techniques to understand a subset of these comments in more detail, and to propose tool support that can help developers manage self-admitted technical debt more effectively. Based on a qualitative study of 333 comments indicating self-admitted technical debt, we first identify one particular class of debt amenable to automated management: on-hold self-admitted technical debt (on-hold SATD), i.e., debt which contains a condition to indicate that a developer is waiting for a certain event or an updated functionality having been implemented elsewhere. We then design and evaluate an automated classifier which can identify these on-hold instances with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.98 as well as detect the specific conditions that developers are waiting for. Our work presents a first step towards automated tool support that is able to indicate when certain instances of self-admitted technical debt are ready to be addressed.

中文翻译：

---

等待它：确定“暂停”自我承认的技术债务

自我承认的技术债务是指软件开发人员知道他们当前的实现不是最佳的并使用源代码注释指出这一点的情况。在这项工作中，我们假设有可能开发自动化技术来更详细地理解这些评论的一个子集，并提出可以帮助开发人员更有效地管理自认技术债务的工具支持。基于对 333 条表明自我承认的技术债务的评论的定性研究，我们首先确定了一种适合自动化管理的特定债务类别：暂停自我承认的技术债务 (on-hold SATD)，即包含条件的债务表示开发人员正在等待某个事件或已在其他地方实现的更新功能。然后，我们设计并评估了一个自动分类器，该分类器可以识别这些暂停实例，接收器操作特征曲线 (AUC) 下的面积为 0.98，并检测开发人员正在等待的特定条件。我们的工作是迈向自动化工具支持的第一步，它能够表明某些自我承认的技术债务情况何时可以解决。