During the development phase, software programmers usually introduce code that contains issues intentionally left for additional treatment. To allow for future fixing, they mark such code using textual comments, resulting in Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). Detecting SATD contained in source code has become crucial in the development cycle since it helps programmers locate issues that need to be solved, thus improving code quality. We introduce PILOT, a technical debt detector built on top of a combination of different natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques. First, the semantic among SATD comments is captured using feature extraction steps. Then, neural network algorithms are applied to classify comments, represented as vectors. We built a PILOT prototype with a feed-forward neural network and evaluated it using real-world datasets as proof of concept. The empirical evaluation shows that PILOT obtains an encouraging performance and outperforms a well-established baseline. We anticipate that our tool will come in handy, as once being embedded in the IDE, it can help developers recognize SATD manifested in their code, allowing them to conveniently identify and fix issues.

Due to limited time, budget or resources, a team is prone to introduce code that does not follow the best software development practices. This code that introduces instability in the software projects is known as Technical Debt (TD). Often, TD intentionally manifests in source code, which is known as Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). This paper presents DebtHunter, a natural language processing (NLP)- and machine learning (ML)- based approach for identifying and classifying SATD in source code comments. The proposed classification approach combines two classification phases for differentiating between the multiple debt types. Evaluations over 10 open source systems, containing more than 259k comments, showed that the approach was able to improve the performance of others in the literature. The presented approach is supported by a tool that can help developers to effectively manage SATD. The tool complements the analysis over Java source code by allowing developers to also examine the associated issue tracker. DebtHunter can be used in a continuous evolution environment to monitor the development process and make developers aware of how and where SATD is introduced, thus helping them to manage and resolve it.