Javadoc Violations and Their Evolution in Open-Source Software
| Autor: | Marcel Steinbeck, Rainer Koschke |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Source code
Java Programming language Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Maintainability 020207 software engineering Javadoc 02 engineering and technology computer.software_genre Software quality Documentation 020204 information systems 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Software repository computer De facto standard media_common computer.programming_language |
| Zdroj: | SANER |
| DOI: | 10.1109/saner50967.2021.00031 |
| Popis: | Software quality comprises different and interrelated aspects. One of them is maintainability, which in turn is made up of measurable attributes. Previous studies have shown that documentation, by contributing to the comprehensibility of software, may have a positive effect on maintainability and, hence, software quality. This paper presents a study in which we analyzed Javadoc comments from 163 different open-source projects. Javadoc is the de facto standard for documenting source code files in Java projects, and although its syntax is less strict than in other (programming) languages, documentation written with Javadoc may contain violations. Our study focuses on the detection of different types of Javadoc violations as well as the source code elements affected by them. Also, by utilizing software repository mining techniques, we examined the history of the subject systems to gain further insights into the evolution of Javadoc violations. According to our results, about half of the source code elements have no Javadoc whatsoever. Among the different components of Javadoc comments (if present), the description of exceptions, by far, has the highest average ratio of violations. With regard to the types of affected elements, constructors and methods show very high average ratios. Also, we found that, on average, violations live more than two years.Nowadays, most integrated development environments (IDEs) for Java are capable of detecting missing Javadoc comments as well as comments with syntactic errors. However, our results indicate that the documentation of source code might be considered less important to developers or that these tools alone may not be sufficient for maintaining consistent documentation. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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