  Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) is a particular case of Technical Debt
(TD) where developers explicitly acknowledge their sub-optimal implementation
decisions. Previous studies mine SATD by searching for specific TD-related
terms in source code comments. By contrast, in this paper we argue that
developers can admit technical debt by other means, e.g., by creating issues in
tracking systems and labelling them as referring to TD. We refer to this type
of SATD as issue-based SATD or just SATD-I. We study a sample of 286 SATD-I
instances collected from five open source projects, including Microsoft Visual
Studio and GitLab Community Edition. We show that only 29% of the studied
SATD-I instances can be tracked to source code comments. We also show that
SATD-I issues take more time to be closed, compared to other issues, although
they are not more complex in terms of code churn. Besides, in 45% of the
studied issues TD was introduced to ship earlier, and in almost 60% it refers
to Design flaws. Finally, we report that most developers pay SATD-I to reduce
its costs or interests (66%). Our findings suggest that there is space for
designing novel tools to support technical debt management, particularly tools
that encourage developers to create and label issues containing TD concerns.
