Study on annotating implementation and design choices, and technical debt

[Fiorella Zampetti]

Dear all,

As software engineering research teams at the University of Sannio
(Italy) and Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) we
are interested in investigating the protocol used by developers while
they have to annotate implementation and design choices during their
normal development activities. More specifically, we are looking at
whether, where and what kind of annotations developers usually use
trying to be focused more on those annotations mainly aimed at
highlighting that the code is not in the right shape (e.g., comments
for annotating delayed or intended work activities such as TODO,
FIXME, hack, workaround, etc). In the latter case, we are looking at
what is the content of the above annotations, as well as how they
usually behave while evolving the code that has been previously
annotated.

When answering the survey, in case your annotation practices are
different in different open source projects you may contribute, please
refer to how you behave for the projects where you have been
contacted.

Filling out the survey will take about 5 minutes.

Please note that your identity and personal data will not be
disclosed, while we plan to use the aggregated results and anonymized
responses as part of a scientific publication.

If you have any questions about the questionnaire or our research,
please do not hesitate to contact us.

You can find the survey link here:
https://forms.gle/NQULdWRVvXYeMc1r6

Thanks and regards,

Fiorella Zampetti (fzampetti at unisannio.it)
Gianmarco Fucci (gianmarcofucci94 at gmail.com)
Alexander Serebrenik (a.serebrenik at tue.nl)
Massimiliano Di Penta (dipenta at unisannio.it)