An Exploratory Study of the Relationship between SATD and Other Software Development Activities

Technical Debt is a common issue that arises when short-term gains are prioritized over long-term costs, leading to a degradation in the quality of the code. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a specific type of Technical Debt that involves documenting code to remind developers of its debt. Previous research has explored various aspects of SATD, including detection methods, distribution, and its impact on software quality. To better understand SATD, one comprehension technique is to examine its co-occurrence with other activities, such as refactoring and bug fixing. This study investigates the relationship between removing and adding SATD and activities such as refactoring, bug fixing, adding new features, and testing. To do so, we analyzed 77 open-source Java projects using TODO/FIXME/XXX removal or addition in inline comments as indicators of SATD. We examined the co-occurrence of SATD with each activity in each project through chi-square and odds ratio evaluations. Our results show that SATD removal occurs simultaneously with refactoring in 95% of projects, while its addition occurs in 89% of projects. Furthermore, we found that three types of refactoring - "move class", "remove method", and "move attribute" - occur more frequently in the presence of SATD. However, their distribution is similar in projects with and without SATD.