Code comment quality analysis and improvement recommendation: An automated approach

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

8-2016

Abstract

Program comprehension is one of the first and mostfrequently performed activities during software maintenance and evolution. In aprogram, there are not only source code, but also comments. Comments in aprogram is one of the main sources of information for program comprehension. Ifa program has good comments, it will be easier for developers to understand it.Unfortunately, for many software systems, due to developers’ poor coding styleor hectic work schedule, it is often the case that a number of methods andclasses are not written with good comments. This can make it difficult fordevelopers to understand the methods and classes, when they are performingfuture software maintenance tasks. To deal with this problem, in this paper wepropose an approach which assesses the quality of a code comment and generatessuggestions to improve comment quality. A user study is conducted to assess theeffectiveness of our approach and the results show that our comment qualityassessments are similar to the assessments made by our user study participants,the suggestions provided by our approach are useful to improve comment quality,and our approach can improve the accuracy of the previous comment qualityanalysis approaches.

Keywords

Program comprehension, code comment quality analysis, user study

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Volume

26

Issue

6

First Page

981

Last Page

1000

ISSN

0218-1940

Identifier

10.1142/S0218194016500339

Publisher

World Scientific Publishing

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194016500339

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