  Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept to describe the
self-documented addition of technical debt to a software project in the form of
source code comments. SATD can linger in projects and degrade source-code
quality, but it can also be more visible than unintentionally added or
undocumented technical debt. Understanding the implications of adding SATD to a
software project is important because developers can benefit from a better
understanding of the quality trade-offs they are making. However, empirical
studies, analyzing the survivability and removal of SATD comments, are
challenged by potential code changes or SATD comment updates that may interfere
with properly tracking their appearance, existence, and removal. In this paper,
we propose SATDBailiff, a tool that uses an existing state-of-the-art SATD
detection tool, to identify SATD in method comments, then properly track their
lifespan. SATDBailiff is given as input links to open source projects, and its
output is a list of all identified SATDs, and for each detected SATD,
SATDBailiff reports all its associated changes, including any updates to its
text, all the way to reporting its removal. The goal of SATDBailiff is to aid
researchers and practitioners in better tracking SATDs instances and providing
them with a reliable tool that can be easily extended. SATDBailiff was
validated using a dataset of previously detected and manually validated SATD
instances.
  SATDBailiff is publicly available as an open-source, along with the manual
analysis of SATD instances associated with its validation, on the project
website
