English
Related papers

Related papers: Comment Generation for Source Code: State of the A…

200 papers

One common task of developing or maintaining software is searching the source code for information like specific method calls or write accesses to certain fields. This kind of information is required to correctly implement new features and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-11-18 Markus Kimmig , Martin Monperrus , Mira Mezini

Software development projects involve the use of a wide range of tools to produce a software artifact. Software repositories such as source control systems have become a focus for emergent research because they are a source of rich…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-04-20 Jacqui Finlay , Russel Pears , Andy M. Connor

In software development and maintenance, code comments can help developers understand source code, and improve communication among developers. However, developers sometimes neglect to update the corresponding comment when changing the code,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Yuan Huang , Yinan Chen , Xiangping Chen , Xiaocong Zhou

Code review is a crucial component of modern software development, involving the evaluation of code quality, providing feedback on potential issues, and refining the code to address identified problems. Despite these benefits, code review…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Oussama Ben Sghaier , Rosalia Tufano , Gabriele Bavota , Houari Sahraoui

Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Delano Oliveira

Programming languages are emerging as a challenging and interesting domain for machine learning. A core task, which has received significant attention in recent years, is building generative models of source code. However, to our knowledge,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Rui Zhao , David Bieber , Kevin Swersky , Daniel Tarlow

Software is primarily developed for people by people and human factors must be studied in all software engineering phases. Creativity is the source to improvise solutions to problems for dominating complex systems such as software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2013-05-28 Daniel Graziotin

Recent research provides evidence that effective communication in collaborative software development has significant impact on the software development lifecycle. Although related qualitative and quantitative studies point out textual…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-03-07 Vasiliki Efstathiou , Diomidis Spinellis

The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Luca Di Grazia , Michael Pradel

The advancements in machine learning techniques have encouraged researchers to apply these techniques to a myriad of software engineering tasks that use source code analysis, such as testing and vulnerability detection. Such a large number…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Tushar Sharma , Maria Kechagia , Stefanos Georgiou , Rohit Tiwari , Indira Vats , Hadi Moazen , Federica Sarro

With the recent explosion in the size and complexity of source codebases and software projects, the need for efficient source code search engines has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, existing information retrieval-based methods fail…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Muhammad Khalifa

Comments are an integral part of software development; they are natural language descriptions associated with source code elements. Understanding explicit associations can be useful in improving code comprehensibility and maintaining the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Sheena Panthaplackel , Milos Gligoric , Raymond J. Mooney , Junyi Jessy Li

Generative models for source code are an interesting structured prediction problem, requiring to reason about both hard syntactic and semantic constraints as well as about natural, likely programs. We present a novel model for this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-18 Marc Brockschmidt , Miltiadis Allamanis , Alexander L. Gaunt , Oleksandr Polozov

Software development is a complex activity which depends on diverse technologies and people's expertise. The approaches to developing software highly depend on these different characteristics, which are the context developers are subject…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-21 Glaucia Melo , Paulo Alencar , Don Cowan

While programming is one of the most broadly applicable skills in modern society, modern machine learning models still cannot code solutions to basic problems. Despite its importance, there has been surprisingly little work on evaluating…

Software comments are critical for human understanding of software, and as such many comment generation techniques have been proposed. However, we find that a systematic evaluation of the factual accuracy of generated comments is rare; only…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Sungmin Kang , Louis Milliken , Shin Yoo

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-13 Matúš Sulír , Milan Nosáľ , Jaroslav Porubän

Automatically generating concise, informative comments for source code can lighten documentation effort and accelerate program comprehension. Retrieval-augmented approaches first fetch code snippets with existing comments and then…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Tien P. T. Le , Anh M. T. Bui , Huy N. D. Pham , Alessio Bucaioni , Phuong T. Nguyen

In order to solve today's complex problems in the world of software development, technical knowledge is no longer enough. Previous studies investigating and identifying non-technical skills of software engineers show that creative skills…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Wouter Groeneveld , Laurens Luyten , Joost Vennekens , Kris Aerts

This paper investigates the quality of source code comments automatically generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). While AI-based comment generation has emerged as a promising solution to reduce developers' documentation effort, prior…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ian Guelman , Arthur Gregório Leal , Laerte Xavier , Marco Tulio Valente