Title
Self-admitted technical debt detection by learning its comprehensive semantics via graph neural networks
Abstract
The goal of software development is to deliver software products with high quality and free from defects, but resource and time constraints often cause the developers to submit incomplete or temporary patches of codes and further bear the additional burden. Therefore, the investigations on identifying self-admitted technical debt (SATD) to improve code quality have been conducted in recent years. However, missing syntactic structure information and the imbalance distribution bias shorten the SATD identification performance. Addressing to this issue, we present a graph neural network based SATD identification model (GNNSI) to improve the performance. Specifically, we obtain the structure information of the missing SATD in a compositional way to obtain different feature maps for different comments, and use focal loss to handle the imbalance between SATD and non-SATD classes in the comments. Then extensive experiments on 10 open source projects are conducted, and the results show that GNNSI outperforms the baselines and can help developers to better predict SATDs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1002/spe.3117
SOFTWARE-PRACTICE & EXPERIENCE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
cross project prediction, graph neural network, self-admitted technical debt
Journal
52
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
0038-0644
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hui Li182.12
Yang Qu200.34
Yong Liu32526265.08
Rong Chen419232.36
Jun Ai500.34
Shikai Guo6111.83