Title
A Contextualized Vocabulary Model for identifying technical debt on code comments
Abstract
The identification of technical debt (TD) is an important step to effectively manage it. In this context, a set of indicators has been used by automated approaches to identify TD items, but some debt may not be directly identified using only metrics collected from the source code. In this work we propose CVM-TD, a model to support the identification of technical debt through code comment analysis. We performed an exploratory study on two large open sources projects with the goal of characterizing the feasibility of the proposed model to support the detection of TD through code comments analysis. The results indicate that (1) developers use the dimensions considered by CVM-TD when writing code comments, (2) CVM-TD provides a vocabulary that may be used to detect TD items, and (3) the proposed model needs to be calibrated in order to reduce the difference between comments returned by the vocabulary and those that may indicate a TD item. Code comments analysis can be used to detect TD in software projects and CVM-TD may support the development team to perform this task.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/MTD.2015.7332621
2015 IEEE 7th International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt (MTD)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Technical debt identification,technical debt indicator,mining comment,code comment analysis
Information retrieval,Source code,Computer science,Context model,Debt,Software,KPI-driven code analysis,Technical debt,Documentation,Vocabulary,Database
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.58
19
Authors
4