Related papers: What Do Developers Discuss about Code Comments?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…
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,…
Researches have shown that most effort of today's software development is maintenance and evolution. Developers often use integrated development environments, debuggers, and tools for code search, testing, and program understanding to…
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…
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…
Large language model (LLM)-powered code review automation tools have been introduced to generate code review comments. However, not all generated comments will drive code changes. Understanding what types of generated review comments are…
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…
Recently, automatic code comment generation is proposed to facilitate program comprehension. Existing code comment generation techniques focus on describing the functionality of the source code. However, there are other aspects such as…
Background: Sub-optimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers may write low-quality code due to many reasons, such as lack of technical knowledge, lack of experience, time pressure, management decisions, and even unhappiness.…
Low-code software development (LCSD) is an emerging approach to democratize application development for software practitioners from diverse backgrounds. LCSD platforms promote rapid application development with a drag-and-drop interface and…
Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual…
Code comments play a prominent role in program comprehension activities. However, source code is not always documented and code and comments not always co-evolve. To deal with these issues, researchers have proposed techniques to…