Related papers: Are your comments outdated? Towards automatically …

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…

Comments play an important role in updating Stack Overflow (SO) posts. They are used to point out a problem (e.g., obsolete answer and buggy code) in a SO answer or ask for more details about a proposed answer. We refer to this type of…

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 However, comments are often missing, generally inaccurate, or out of date.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 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…

Background: Despite the widespread use of automated security defect detection tools, software projects still contain many security defects that could result in serious damage. Such tools are largely context-insensitive and may not cover all…

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…

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…

The code review comment (CRC) is pivotal in the process of modern code review. It provides reviewers with the opportunity to identify potential bugs, offer constructive feedback, and suggest improvements. Clear and concise code review…

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…

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…

When changing code, developers sometimes neglect updating the related comments, bringing inconsistent or outdated comments. These comments increase the cost of program understanding and greatly reduce software maintainability. Researchers…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

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…

We formulate the novel task of automatically updating an existing natural language comment based on changes in the body of code it accompanies. We propose an approach that learns to correlate changes across two distinct language…

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…

Comment updating is an emerging task in software evolution that aims to automatically revise source code comments in accordance with code changes. This task plays a vital role in maintaining code-comment consistency throughout software…

A source code difference (diff) indicates changes made by comparing new and old source codes, and it can be utilized in code reviews to help developers understand the changes made to the code. Although many diff generation methods have been…

As a software system evolves, its architecture tends to degrade, and gradually impedes software maintenance and evolution activities and negatively impacts the quality attributes of the system. The main root cause behind architecture…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

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…