Identifying selfadmitted technical debt through code comment analysis with a contextualized vocabulary Abstract   Context  Previous work has shown that one can explore code comments to detect SelfAdmitted Technical Debt (SATD) using a contextualized vocabulary. However, current detection strategies still return a large number of false positives items. Moreover, those strategies do not allow the automatic identification of the type of debt of the identified items.    Objective  This work applies, evaluates, and improves a set of contextualized patterns we built to detect selfadmitted technical debt using code comment analysis. We refer to this set of patterns as the selfadmitted technical debt identification vocabulary.    Method  We carry out three empirical studies. Firstly, 23 participants analyze the patterns of a previously defined contextualized vocabulary and register their level of importance in identifying SATD items. Secondly, we perform a qualitative analysis to investigate the relation between each pattern and types of debt. Finally, we perform a feasibility study using a new vocabulary, improved based on the results of the previous empirical studies, to automatically identify selfadmitted technical debt items, and types of debt, that exist in three open source projects.    Results  More than half of the new patterns were considered decisive or very decisive to detect technical debt items. The new vocabulary was able to find items associated to code, design, defect, documentation, and requirement debt. Thus, the result of the work is an improved vocabulary that considers the level of importance of each pattern and the relationship between patterns and debt types to support the identification and classification of SATD items.    Conclusion  The studies allowed us to improve a vocabulary to identify selfadmitted technical debt items through code comments analysis. The results show that the use of patternbased code comment analysis can contribute to improve existing methods, or create new ones, for automatically identifying and classifying technical debt items.

Familiarity, Causes and Reactions of Software Practitioners to the Presence of Technical Debt: A Replicated Study in the Chilean Software Industry Decisions made to accomplish shortterm goals but affecting negatively the maintainability of the system is called Technical Debt (TD). In Chile, where software industry is rising 11% every year, it becomes crucial to understand how TD is perceived in software teams, its causes and how they are dealing with it. To accomplish this task we ran a TD survey, as a part of InsighTD. Results showed that almost two thirds of the respondents had some level of familiarity with the concept of TD. Among them, lack of qualified professionals is the most cited cause in general and, also, by software architects and developers. Conversely, planning and management is the most cited category of causes of TD. Results indicated that the concept of TD is well understood by software practitioners and that most efforts need to be invested by researchers on offering strategies and tools to support TD management.