Title: Wait For It: Identifying "On-Hold" Self-Admitted Technical Debt,
Abstract: Self-admitted technical debt refers to situations where a software developer
knows that their current implementation is not optimal and indicates this using
a source code comment. In this work, we hypothesize that it is possible to
develop automated techniques to understand a subset of these comments in more
detail, and to propose tool support that can help developers manage
self-admitted technical debt more effectively. Based on a qualitative study of
335 comments indicating self-admitted technical debt, we first identify one
particular class of debt amenable to automated management: "on-hold"
self-admitted technical debt, i.e., debt which contains a condition to indicate
that a developer is waiting for a certain event or an updated functionality
having been implemented elsewhere. We then design and evaluate an automated
classifier which can automatically identify these "on-hold" instances with a
precision of 0.81 as well as detect the specific conditions that developers are
waiting for. Our work presents a first step towards automated tool support that
is able to indicate when certain instances of self-admitted technical debt are
ready to be addressed.