Study on technical debt and source code commenting

[Massimiliano Di Penta]

Hello,

We're a team of Software Engineering researchers investigating technical debt. Technical debt refers to "not quite right code which we postpone making it right” (Cunningham)  and this may often introduce a cost. More specifically, the aim of this study is to gather information on how open source developers respond to specific source code phenomena such as partially or wrongly implemented functionality. With the results of this study we aim to create a better understanding of how developers annotate issues in source code. These results will be used to support prioritisation of maintenance activities in software systems. The survey data will be collected, analyzed and stored so that research questions can be answered and the results can be published. Since the survey is anonymous, no personal information is collected. For the same reason we cannot modify or remove answers upon request.

If you contribute code to this project you can help us out by filling out the following survey: 

https://forms.office.com/r/xRg92faiNd

The survey should take you at most 15 minutes. 

For those interested, we will be very happy to share our study results.

Thanks in advance,

Massimiliano Di Penta, University of Sannio, Italy

on behalf of

Nathan Cooper and Alexander Serebrenik, Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands

Fiorella Zampetti, University of Sannio, Italy

Nicole Novielli, University of Bari, Italy