Understanding the Effectiveness of LLMs in Automated Self-Admitted Technical Debt Repayment

Abstract: Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD), cases where developers intentionally acknowledge suboptimal solutions in code through comments, poses a significant challenge to software maintainability. Left unresolved, SATD can degrade code quality and increase maintenance costs. While LLMs have shown promise in tasks like code generation and program repair, their potential in automated SATD repayment remains underexplored. In this paper, we identify three key challenges in training and evaluating LLMs for SATD repayment: (1) dataset representativeness and scalability, (2) removal of irrelevant SATD repayments, and (3) limitations of existing evaluation metrics. To address the first two dataset-related challenges, we adopt a language-independent SATD tracing tool and design a 10-step filtering pipeline to extract SATD repayments from repositories, resulting two large-scale datasets: 58,722 items for Python and 97,347 items for Java. To improve evaluation, we introduce two diff-based metrics, BLEU-diff and CrystalBLEU-diff, which measure code changes rather than whole code. Additionally, we propose another new metric, LEMOD, which is both interpretable and informative. Using our new benchmarks and evaluation metrics, we evaluate two types of automated SATD repayment methods: fine-tuning smaller models, and prompt engineering with five large-scale models. Our results reveal that fine-tuned small models achieve comparable Exact Match (EM) scores to prompt-based approaches but underperform on BLEU-based metrics and LEMOD. Notably, Gemma-2-9B leads in EM, addressing 10.1% of Python and 8.1% of Java SATDs, while Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct and GPT-4o-mini excel on BLEU-diff, CrystalBLEU-diff, and LEMOD metrics. Our work contributes a robust benchmark, improved evaluation metrics, and a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs, advancing research on automated SATD repayment.