Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2019

Abstract

Links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, and source code repositories are no exception. However, despite their many undisputed benefits, links can suffer from decay, insufficient versioning, and lack of bidirectional traceability. In this paper, we investigate the role of links contained in source code comments from these perspectives. We conducted a large-scale study of around 9.6 million links to establish their prevalence, and we used a mixed-methods approach to identify the links' targets, purposes, decay, and evolutionary aspects. We found that links are prevalent in source code repositories, that licenses, software homepages, and specifications are common types of link targets, and that links are often included to provide metadata or attribution. Links are rarely updated, but many link targets evolve. Almost 10% of the links included in source code comments are dead. We then submitted a batch of link-fixing pull requests to open source software repositories, resulting in most of our fixes being merged successfully. Our findings indicate that links in source code comments can indeed be fragile, and our work opens up avenues for future work to address these problems.

Keywords

code comment, knowledge sharing, link decay

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering,

First Page

1211

Last Page

1221

ISBN

9781728108698

Identifier

10.1109/ICSE.2019.00123

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Montreal, Canada

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00123

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