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https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-23362| Publication type: | Conference paper |
| Type of review: | Peer review (publication) |
| Title: | What do developers discuss about code comments? |
| Authors: | Rani, Pooja Birrer, Mathias Panichella, Sebastiano Ghafari, Mohammad Nierstrasz, Oscar |
| et. al: | No |
| DOI: | 10.21256/zhaw-23362 |
| Conference details: | 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), online, 27-28 September 2021 |
| Issue Date: | 2021 |
| Publisher / Ed. Institution: | ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften |
| Publisher / Ed. Institution: | Winterthur |
| Other identifiers: | arXiv:2108.07648v1 |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | Mining online source; Stack Overflow; Quora; Code comment analysis; Software documentation |
| Subject (DDC): | 005: Computer programming, programs and data |
| Abstract: | Code comments are important for program comprehension, development, and maintenance tasks. Given the varying standards for code comments, and their unstructured or semistructured nature, developers get easily confused (especially novice developers) about which convention(s) to follow, or what tools to use while writing code documentation. Thus, they post related questions on external online sources to seek better commenting practices. In this paper, we analyze code comment discussions on online sources such as Stack Overflow (SO) and Quora to shed some light on the questions developers ask about commenting practices. We apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify emerging topics concerning code comments. Then we manually analyze a statistically significant sample set of posts to derive a taxonomy that provides an overview of the developer questions about commenting practices. Our results highlight that on SO nearly 40% of the questions mention how to write or process comments in documentation tools and environments, and nearly 20% of the questions are about potential limitations and possibilities of documentation tools to add automatically and consistently more information in comments. On the other hand, on Quora, developer questions focus more on background information (35% of the questions) or asking opinions (16% of the questions) about code comments. We found that (i) not all aspects of comments are covered in coding style guidelines, e.g., how to add a specific type of information, (ii) developers need support in learning the syntax and format conventions to add various types of information in comments, and (iii) developers are interested in various automated strategies for comments such as detection of bad comments, or verify comment style automatically, but lack tool support to do that. |
| URI: | https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/23362 |
| Fulltext version: | Accepted version |
| License (according to publishing contract): | Licence according to publishing contract |
| Departement: | School of Engineering |
| Organisational Unit: | Institute of Computer Science (InIT) |
| Appears in collections: | Publikationen School of Engineering |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021_Rani-etal_Code-comment-discussion_SCAM.pdf | Accepted Version | 646.04 kB | Adobe PDF |  View/Open |
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Rani, P., Birrer, M., Panichella, S., Ghafari, M., & Nierstrasz, O. (2021). What do developers discuss about code comments? 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), Online, 27-28 September 2021. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-23362
Rani, P. et al. (2021) ‘What do developers discuss about code comments?’, in 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), online, 27-28 September 2021. Winterthur: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. Available at: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-23362.
P. Rani, M. Birrer, S. Panichella, M. Ghafari, and O. Nierstrasz, “What do developers discuss about code comments?,” in 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), online, 27-28 September 2021, 2021. doi: 10.21256/zhaw-23362.
RANI, Pooja, Mathias BIRRER, Sebastiano PANICHELLA, Mohammad GHAFARI und Oscar NIERSTRASZ, 2021. What do developers discuss about code comments? In: 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), online, 27-28 September 2021. Conference paper. Winterthur: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. 2021
Rani, Pooja, Mathias Birrer, Sebastiano Panichella, Mohammad Ghafari, and Oscar Nierstrasz. 2021. “What Do Developers Discuss About Code Comments?” Conference paper. In 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), Online, 27-28 September 2021. Winterthur: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-23362.
Rani, Pooja, et al. “What Do Developers Discuss About Code Comments?” 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), Online, 27-28 September 2021, ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, 2021, https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-23362.
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