Self-Admitted Technical Debt Detection Approaches: A Decade Systematic Review

Technical debt (TD) represents the long-term costs associated with suboptimal design or code decisions in software development, often made to meet short-term delivery goals. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) occurs when developers explicitly acknowledge these trade-offs in the codebase, typically through comments or annotations. Automated detection of SATD has become an increasingly important research area, particularly with the rise of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) techniques that aim to streamline SATD detection. This systematic literature review provides a comprehensive analysis of SATD detection approaches published between 2014 and 2024, focusing on the evolution of techniques from NLP-based models to more advanced ML, DL, and Transformers-based models such as BERT. The review identifies key trends in SATD detection methodologies and tools, evaluates the effectiveness of different approaches using metrics like precision, recall, and F1-score, and highlights the primary challenges in this domain, including dataset heterogeneity, model generalizability, and the explainability of models. The findings suggest that while early NLP methods laid the foundation for SATD detection, more recent advancements in DL and Transformers models have significantly improved detection accuracy. However, challenges remain in scaling these models for broader industrial use. This SLR offers insights into current research gaps and provides directions for future work, aiming to improve the robustness and practicality of SATD detection tools.