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.