# Investigation on Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Open-Source Blockchain Projects
## 2 Background
### Self-Admitted Technical Debt  
The quality of the software is an issue that needs to be addressed because it affects the cost, reliability, and longevity of software products. Consequently, it is essential to have tools and metrics to keep quality under control during the entire product life cycle. When developers take shortcuts during software development, mostly for the sake of expediency, it is called technical debt. Technical Debt (TD) is unfinished work or tempo rary workarounds that can negatively impact software maintenance and overall quality. Technical debt impacts the quality of applications by generating structural weaknesses that translate into slowness and functional deficiencies at the development level. In the context of Agile programming, the more the technical debt grows, the more time it takes to compensate for errors, intervening at the syntax and refactoring levels. By doing an exploratory investigation on source code comments that hint to instances of TD, [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2014) [7] changed the course of their research. They discovered that a significant portion of TD is explicitly admitted by developers via code comments. This phenomenon was initially referred to by the authors as Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) which was proposed to take into account debt that is purposely introduced (for example, by a temporary fix) and confessed by developers themselves. SATD refers to technical debt incurred by developers themselves (for example, comments to indicate an imperfect implementation that should be replaced or improved later). In brief, it refers to when these shortcuts are explicitly admitted by developers, such as when they write a TODO or Fixme comment. [PERSON] and [PERSON]'s exploratory study on TD focused primarily on three aspects: the amount of SATD quantification, the motivations for SATD introduction, and the actual removal percentage of SATD, as well as a deeper analysis of the comments on the source code, focusing on SATD in software development in open-source software projects. The study used data from four large open-source projects: Eclipse, Chromium OS, Apache HTTP server, and ArgoUML. Given the importance of code comments for programmers to communicate information about their code, and to be used to help improve the quality of a codebase, it is important to track the status of TD in order to make informed decisions about how to manage it. Previous research has demonstrated that source code comments may effectively identify TD. The focus of earlier research has been on detecting SATD in issue trackers and source code comments. In ref. [8], the relationship between SATD and software quality has been empirically investigated by using data collected from five open-source projects. In particular, it has been looked at whether files with SATD have more flaws than files without SATD, whether SATD changes cause new flaws, and whether SATD-related changes tend to be more challenging. Currently, the number of studies that propose automatic methods for detecting SATD from additional sources, such as commit messages and pull requests, or by fusing different sources. Several studies have focused on SATD detection and examined its impact on software quality. However, preliminary findings indicate that not all SATD is bad, and some may need to be removed while others may be acceptable, but SATD detection is a way of detecting technical debt through code comments and to remove it [14]. In particular, the median time for SATD to be removed is between 18 and 172 days. Developers mostly use SATD to track future bugs and areas of the code that need improvement. They also mostly remove SATD when they are fixing bugs or adding new features. These findings contribute to the body of empirical evidence on SATD, particularly its removal [14]. After a couple of years, [PERSON] et al. in ref. [20], conducted an in-depth quantitative and qualitative study of how SATD is addressed in five Java open-source projects and how to reduce it.