Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) annotates development decisions that intentionally exchange long-term software artifact quality for short-term goals. Recent work explores the existence of SATD clones (duplicate or near duplicate SATD comments) in source code. Cloning of SATD in build systems (e.g., CMake and Maven) may propagate suboptimal design choices, threatening qualities of the build system that stakeholders rely upon (e.g., maintainability, reliability, repeatability). Hence, we conduct a large-scale study on 50,608 SATD comments extracted from Autotools, CMake, Maven, and Ant build systems to investigate the prevalence of SATD clones and to characterize their incidences. We observe that: (i) prior work suggests that 41-65% of SATD comments in source code are clones, but in our studied build system context, the rates range from 62% to 95%, suggesting that SATD clones are a more prevalent phenomenon in build systems than in source code; (ii) statements surrounding SATD clones are highly similar, with 76% of occurrences having similarity scores greater than 0.8; (iii) a quarter of SATD clones are introduced by the author of the original SATD statements; and (iv) among the most commonly cloned SATD comments, external factors (e.g., platform and tool configuration) are the most frequent locations, limitations in tools and libraries are the most frequent causes, and developers often copy SATD comments that describe issues to be fixed later. Our work presents the first step toward systematically understanding SATD clones in build systems and opens up avenues for future work, such as distinguishing different SATD clone behavior, as well as designing an automated recommendation system for repaying SATD effectively based on resolved clones.

翻译：自承认技术债务(Self-Admitted Technical Debt, SATD)标注了那些刻意以长期软件制品质量为代价换取短期目标的开发决策。近期研究探索了源代码中SATD克隆（重复或近似重复的SATD注释）的存在性。构建系统（如CMake和Maven）中的SATD克隆可能传播次优设计决策，威胁利益相关者所依赖的构建系统质量属性（如可维护性、可靠性、可重复性）。为此，我们对从Autotools、CMake、Maven和Ant构建系统中提取的50,608条SATD注释开展大规模研究，以探究SATD克隆的普遍性并刻画其发生特征。我们发现：（i）先前研究指出源代码中41%-65%的SATD注释属于克隆，而在我们所研究的构建系统场景中，该比例范围为62%-95%，表明SATD克隆在构建系统中比在源代码中更为普遍；（ii）SATD克隆周边的语句高度相似，76%的实例相似度得分超过0.8；（iii）四分之一的SATD克隆由原始SATD语句的作者引入；（iv）在最常见克隆的SATD注释中，外部因素（如平台和工具配置）是最频繁的定位区域，工具与库的局限性是最常见的成因，开发者常复制描述待修复问题的SATD注释。本研究首次系统性地揭示了构建系统中SATD克隆现象，为后续研究开辟了新方向，例如区分不同类型的SATD克隆行为，以及基于已解决的克隆设计自动推荐系统以有效偿还SATD。