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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and facilitate program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a primary concern to improve program maintenance. While much effort has been dedicated to detecting bad…
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a new era in automated code translation across programming languages. Since most code-specific LLMs are pretrained on well-commented code from large repositories like GitHub, it is…
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…
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…
Code comment generation aims at generating natural language descriptions for a code snippet to facilitate developers' program comprehension activities. Despite being studied for a long time, a bottleneck for existing approaches is that…