Related papers: What do class comments tell us? An investigation o…
Most software maintenance and evolution tasks require developers to understand the source code of their software systems. Software developers usually inspect class comments to gain knowledge about program behavior, regardless of the…
Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
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…
A central function of code review is to increase understanding; helping reviewers understand a code change aids in knowledge transfer and finding bugs. Comments in code largely serve a similar purpose, helping future readers understand the…
Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in…
Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…
Software development is a collaborative process that involves various interactions among individuals and teams. TODO comments in source code play a critical role in managing and coordinating diverse tasks during this process. However, this…
Code reviews are central for software quality assurance. Ideally, reviewers should explain their feedback to enable authors of code changes to understand the feedback and act accordingly. Different developers might need different…
We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…
Tools shape our mind. This is why it is important to have extensible and flexible tools for developers to adapt to their needs. Reasoning about programs in the abstract -- by imagining what objects should look like -- can make it harder to…
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…
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,…
Open-source code development has become widespread in recent years. As a result, open-source software platforms have also become popular, and millions of developers from diverse locations are able to contribute to the same projects. On…
Natural language comments convey key aspects of source code such as implementation, usage, and pre- and post-conditions. Failure to update comments accordingly when the corresponding code is modified introduces inconsistencies, which is…
Developers use different means to document the security concerns of their code. Because of all of these opportunities, they may forget where the information is stored, or others may not be aware of it, and leave it unmaintained for so long…
Large Language Models are essential coding assistants, yet their training is predominantly English-centric. In this study, we evaluate the performance of code language models in non-English contexts, identifying challenges in their adoption…
Code comments are important for developers in program comprehension. In scenarios of comprehending and reusing a method, developers expect code comments to provide supplementary information beyond the method signature. However, the extent…
Code review is a crucial practice in software development. As code review nowadays is lightweight, various issues can be identified, and sometimes, they can be trivial. Research has investigated automated approaches to classify review…
Although peer code review is widely adopted in both commercial and open source development, existing studies suggest that such code reviews often contain a significant amount of non-useful review comments. Unfortunately, to date, no tools…