Hidden in Plain Sight: Where Developers Confess Self-Admitted Technical Debt

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01529v1
• Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 12:47:19 GMT
• Title: Hidden in Plain Sight: Where Developers Confess Self-Admitted Technical Debt
• Authors: Murali Sridharan, Mikel Robredo, Leevi Rantala, Matteo Esposito, Valentina Lenarduzzi, Mika Mantyla,
• Abstract summary: Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is crucial for proactive software maintenance.<n>Previous research has primarily targeted detecting and prioritizing SATD, with little focus on the source code afflicted with SATD.<n>We leverage the extensive SATD dataset PENTACET, containing code comments from over 9000 Java Open Source Software (OSS) repositories.<n>We quantitatively infer where SATD most commonly occurs and which code constructs/statements it most frequently affects.
• Score: 3.0178994719454564
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Context. Detecting Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is crucial for proactive software maintenance. Previous research has primarily targeted detecting and prioritizing SATD, with little focus on the source code afflicted with SATD. Our goal in this work is to connect the SATD comments with source code constructs that surround them. Method. We leverage the extensive SATD dataset PENTACET, containing code comments from over 9000 Java Open Source Software (OSS) repositories. We quantitatively infer where SATD most commonly occurs and which code constructs/statements it most frequently affects. Results and Conclusions. Our large-scale study links over 225,000 SATD comments to their surrounding code, showing that SATD mainly arises in inline code near definitions, conditionals, and exception handling, where developers face uncertainty and trade-offs, revealing it as an intentional signal of awareness during change rather than mere neglect.

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