Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes
| Autor: | Beat Fluri, Harald C. Gall, Michael Würsch |
|---|---|
| Přispěvatelé: | University of Zurich, Fluri, Beat |
| Rok vydání: | 2007 |
| Předmět: |
Class (computer programming)
Source code 10009 Department of Informatics business.industry Programming language Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Software development Software maintenance 000 Computer science knowledge & systems computer.software_genre Internal documentation 2200 General Engineering Code (cryptography) Software system Docstring Software engineering business computer media_common |
| Zdroj: | WCRE |
| ISSN: | 1095-1350 |
| DOI: | 10.1109/wcre.2007.21 |
| Popis: | Comments are valuable especially for program understanding and maintenance, but do developers comment their code? To which extent do they add comments or adapt them when they evolve the code? We examine the question whether source code and associated comments are really changed together along the evolutionary history of a software system. In this paper, we describe an approach to map code and comments to observe their co-evolution over multiple versions. We investigated three open source systems (i.e., ArgoUML, Azureus, and JDT core) and describe how comments and code co-evolved over time. Some of our findings show that: 1) newly added code - despite its growth rate - barely gets commented; 2) class and method declarations are commented most frequently but far less, for example, method calls; and 3) that 97% of comment changes are done in the same revision as the associated source code change. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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