Related papers: What Makes a Good TODO Comment?
TODO comments are very widely used by software developers to describe their pending tasks during software development. However, after performing the task developers sometimes neglect or simply forget to remove the TODO comment, resulting in…
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…
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…
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…
TODO comments are widely used by developers to remind themselves or others about incomplete tasks. In other words, TODO comments are usually associated with temporary or suboptimal solutions. In practice, all the equivalent suboptimal…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
A key issue in collaborative software development is communication among developers. One modality of communication is a commit message, in which developers describe the changes they make in a repository. As such, commit messages serve as an…
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…
Effective peer code review in collaborative software development necessitates useful reviewer comments and supportive automated tools. Code review comments are a central component of the Modern Code Review process in the industry and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…