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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

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…

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Sheena Panthaplackel , Junyi Jessy Li , Milos Gligoric , Raymond J. Mooney

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-13 Mohammad Masudur Rahman , Chanchal K. Roy , Raula G. Kula

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

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

AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kexin Sun , Hongyu Kuang , Sebastian Baltes , Xin Zhou , He Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Guoping Rong , Dong Shao , Christoph Treude

The use of large language models like ChatGPT in code review offers promising efficiency gains but also raises concerns about correctness and safety. Existing evaluation methods for code review generation either rely on automatic…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Robert Heumüller , Frank Ortmeier

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Igor Regis da Silva Simoes , Elaine Venson

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Ratnadira Widyasari , Ting Zhang , Abir Bouraffa , Walid Maalej , David Lo

Previous studies have characterized code comments in various programming languages to support better program comprehension activities and maintenance tasks. However, very few studies have focused on understanding developer practices to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Pooja Rani , Sebastiano Panichella , Manuel Leuenberger , Mohammad Ghafari , Oscar Nierstrasz

Code comments are vital to source code as they help developers with program comprehension tasks. Written in natural language (usually English), code comments convey a variety of different information, which are grouped into specific…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Amila Indika , Peter Y. Washington , Anthony Peruma

The relationship of comments to code, and in particular, the task of generating useful comments given the code, has long been of interest. The earliest approaches have been based on strong syntactic theories of comment-structures, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-10-06 David Gros , Hariharan Sezhiyan , Prem Devanbu , Zhou Yu

Comments are very useful to the flow of code development. With the increasing commonality of code, novice coders have been creating a significant amount of codebases. Due to lack of commenting standards, their comments are often useless,…

Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Eduardo Carneiro Oliveira , Hieke Keuning , Johan Jeuring

Good comments help developers understand software faster and provide better maintenance. However, comments are often missing, generally inaccurate, or out of date. Many of these problems can be avoided by automatic comment generation. This…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Sergey Matskevich , Colin S. Gordon

Code comments can help in program comprehension and are considered as important artifacts to help developers in software maintenance. However, the comments are mostly missing or are outdated, specially in complex software projects. As a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Ramin Shahbazi , Rishab Sharma , Fatemeh H. Fard

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

Background: During software maintenance and development, the comprehension of program code is key to success. High-quality comments can help us better understand programs, but they're often missing or outmoded in today's programs. Automatic…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Yuxiang Zhu , Minxue Pan

Code comments are important in software development because they directly influence software maintainability and overall quality. Bad practices of code comments lead to code comment smells, negatively impacting software maintenance. Recent…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Ipek Oztas , U Boran Torun , Eray Tüzün