Related papers: Associating Natural Language Comment and Source Co…

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 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…

We present the Code Documentation and Analysis Tool (CoDAT). CoDAT is a tool designed to maintain consistency between the various levels of code documentation, e.g. if a line in a code sketch is changed, the comment that documents the…

Many of the existing approaches for program comprehension rely on the linguistic information found in source code, such as identifier names and comments. Semantic clustering is one such technique for modularization of the system that relies…

Primitive types are fundamental components available in any programming language, which serve as the building blocks of data manipulation. Understanding the role of these types in source code is essential to write software. Little work has…

Academic publications have been evaluated in terms of their impact on research communities based on many metrics, such as the number of citations. On the other hand, the impact of academic publications on industry has been rarely studied.…

Translation between natural language and source code can help software development by enabling developers to comprehend, ideate, search, and write computer programs in natural language. Despite growing interest from the industry and the…

Code comments are important for program comprehension, development, and maintenance tasks. Given the varying standards for code comments, and their unstructured or semi-structured nature, developers get easily confused (especially novice…

Background: The process of mapping a source code entity onto an architectural module is to a large degree a manual task. Automating this process could increase the use of static architecture conformance checking methods, such as reflexion…

Source code is rarely written in isolation. It depends significantly on the programmatic context, such as the class that the code would reside in. To study this phenomenon, we introduce the task of generating class member functions given…

Code documentation is a critical aspect of software development, serving as a bridge between human understanding and machine-readable code. Beyond assisting developers in understanding and maintaining code, documentation also plays a…

A source code summary of a subroutine is a brief description of that subroutine. Summaries underpin a majority of documentation consumed by programmers, such as the method summaries in JavaDocs. Source code summarization is the task of…

Impressive progress has been made in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. However, it remains a challenge to find the best point of interaction for these very different modalities. In this chapter we discuss how…

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…

Comments in software are critical for maintenance and reuse. But apart from prescriptive advice, there is little practical support or quantitative understanding of what makes a comment useful. In this paper, we introduce the task of…

A software element defined in one place is typically used in many places. When it is changed, all its occurrences may need to be changed too, which can severely hinder software evolution. This has led to the support of encapsulation in…

Since programming concepts do not match their syntactic representations, code search is a very tedious task. For instance in Java or C, array doesn't match [], so using "array" as a query, one cannot find what they are looking for. Often…

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,…

Existing studies show that code summaries help developers understand and maintain source code. Unfortunately, these summaries are often missing or outdated in software projects. Code summarization aims to generate natural language…

Code generation aims to understand the problem description and generate corresponding code snippets, where existing works generally decompose such complex tasks into intermediate steps by prompting strategies, such as Chain-of-Thought and…