Self-Admitted Technical Debt Detection Approaches: A Decade Systematic Review

Abstract

Technical debt (TD) refers to the long-term costs associated with suboptimal design or code decisions in software development, often made to meet short-term delivery goals. SATD occurs when developers explicitly acknowledge these trade-offs in the codebase, typically through comments or annotations. SATD detection has become an increasingly important research area, particularly with the rise of learning-based techniques that aim to streamline SATD detection. This SLR provides a comprehensive analysis of SATD detection approaches published between 2014 and early 2025, focusing on the evolution of techniques from heuristic-based techniques to more advanced ML, DL, and Transformer-based models. It examines key trends in SATD detection methodologies and tools, evaluates the effectiveness of different approaches using metrics like precision, recall, and F1 score, and highlights the primary challenges in this domain, including dataset heterogeneity, model generalizability, and explainability. The findings reveal that while early heuristic-based techniques laid the foundation for SATD detection, more recent advancements in DL and Transformer models have significantly improved detection accuracy. However, challenges remain in scaling these models for broader industrial adoption. This review offers insights into current research gaps and provides directions for future work, aiming to improve the robustness and practicality of SATD detection tools.