Related papers: What Do Developers Discuss about Code Comments?

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

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…

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular technical Q&A sites used by software developers. Seeking help from Stack Overflow has become an essential part of software developers' daily work for solving programming-related questions. Although…

Perhaps the most widely used form of code documentation is function header comments. We performed a large-scale survey of 367 developers to catalog their expectations from such documentation and to chronicle actual practice. Paradoxically,…

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…

As one of the most well-known programmer Q&A websites, Stack Overflow (i.e., SO) is serving tens of thousands of developers every day. Previous work has shown that many developers reuse the code snippets on SO when they find an answer (from…

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…

Developers use Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to exchange knowledge and expertise. Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A website where developers discuss coding problems and share code examples. Although all Stack Overflow posts are free to…

Knowledge sharing plays a crucial role throughout all software application development activities. When programmers learn and share through media like Stack overflow, GitHub, Meetups, videos, discussion forums, wikis, and blogs, every…

When comprehending code, a helping hand may come from the natural language comments documenting it that, unfortunately, are not always there. To support developers in such a scenario, several techniques have been presented to automatically…

Stack Overflow has become an essential technical resource for developers. However, given the vast amount of knowledge available on Stack Overflow, finding the right information that is relevant for a given task is still challenging,…

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in…

The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…

Software testing plays a crucial role in the contribution process of open-source projects. For example, contributions introducing new features are expected to include tests, and contributions with tests are more likely to be accepted.…

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly integrated into software engineering and maintenance tasks due to their high performance with software engineering tasks and robust understanding of modern programming languages. However,…

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…

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…

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…

Despite the unarguable importance of Stack Overflow (SO) for the daily work of many software developers and despite existing knowledge about the impact of code duplication on software maintainability, the prevalence and implications of code…

Existing automatic code comment generators mainly focus on producing a general description of functionality for a given code snippet without considering developer intentions. However, in real-world practice, comments are complicated, which…