FixMe bot accepted at ASE 2021

FixMe, a GitHub bot built by our undergraduate students Saranphon Phaithoon, Supakarn Wongnil, and Patiphol Pussawong with professors from the Software Engineering Laboratory at NAIST, was accepted in the Tool Demo track of ASE 2021, the 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, which CORE ranks A*. Developers sometimes leave a comment that puts off a proper fix until an issue in their own or another project is resolved, a kind of self-admitted technical debt called on-hold SATD. FixMe detects such comments with machine learning, finds the issues they refer to, and tells the developers when those issues are resolved and the code is ready to be fixed. Saranphon presented the tool at the conference in November 2021.

An evaluation with 11 participants showed that FixMe can support developers in dealing with on-hold SATD. The work began in the students' senior project on identifying technical debt in open-source projects, part of a NAIST internship that Morakot Choetkiertikul supervised with Hideaki Hata.