ASTAGEN: Empirical Evaluation of Automated SATD Taxonomy Generation with LLMs

Abstract: Technical debt refers to suboptimal code that degrades software quality. When developers intentionally introduce such debt, it is called self-admitted technical debt (SATD). Since SATD hinders maintenance, identifying its categories is key to uncovering quality issues. Traditionally, constructing such taxonomies requires manually inspecting SATD comments and surrounding code, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and often inconsistent due to annotator subjectivity. This study presents ASTAGEN, an initial step toward automating SATD taxonomy generation using LLMs. Given a comment and its surrounding code, ASTAGEN first generates a concise explanation for each SATD comment, then incrementally generates and updates categories to construct a taxonomy. We evaluate ASTAGEN on SATD datasets from three domains: quantum software, smart contracts, and machine learning. It successfully recovers domain-specific categories reported in prior work, such as Layer Configuration in machine learning. Compared to a naive use of an LLM, ASTAGEN produces more consistent category assignments due to its explanation-driven, iterative design. It also completes taxonomy generation in under two hours and for less than one USD, even on the largest dataset. These results suggest that while full automation remains challenging, ASTAGEN is able to support semi-automated taxonomy construction. Furthermore, our work opens up avenues for future work, such as automatic taxonomy generation in other areas.