Technical Debt of Software Projects Based on Merge Code Comments

Developers use code comments for various reasons, such as explaining code, documenting specifications, communicating with other developers, and highlighting upcoming tasks. Software projects with minimal documentation often have a significant number of comments. In this sense, the code comment analysis technique can be used to examine more complex aspects of software projects, such as TD generated by merge conflicts. The TD resulting from the resolution of merge conflicts occurs when the resulting code contains comments that indicate tasks to be performed in the future. There are no studies directly linking merge conflicts and TD. The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze code comments generated when resolving merge conflicts from this perspective. This process can lead to improvements in software quality and help in managing TD. To this end, an exploratory analysis was carried out in 100 software projects, with a specific focus on task annotations originating from the resolution of merge conflicts. The results revealed that 60.61% of the analyzed projects have at least one code comment indicating the creation or maintenance of TD. In addition, metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score were applied across different software projects to enhance the effectiveness and reliability of the built data model. The metric results suggest that the tool was able to correctly classify in most cases, but was not particularly precise in this classification due to the size of the analyzed projects and the variety of task annotations, including the presence of some and the absence of others.