Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes

@inproceedings{citeulike:2445535, abstract = {Comments are valuable especially for program under- standing and maintenance, but do developers comment their code? To which extent do they add comments or adapt them when they evolve the code? We examine the question whether source code and associated comments are really changed together along the evolutionary history of a soft- ware system. In this paper, we describe an approach to map code and comments to observe their co-evolution over mul- tiple versions. We investigated three open source systems (i.e., ArgoUML, Azureus, and JDT Core) and describe how comments and code co-evolved over time. Some of our find- ings show that: 1) newly added code--despite its growth rate--barely gets commented; 2) class and method decla- rations are commented most frequently but far less, for ex- ample, method calls; and 3) that 97\&\#x025; of comment changes are done in the same revision as the associated source code change.}, author = {Fluri, Beat and Wursch, Michael and Gall, Harald C. }, booktitle = {Reverse Engineering, 2007. WCRE 2007. 14th Working Conference on}, citeulike-article-id = {2445535}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.2007.21}, journal = {Reverse Engineering, 2007. WCRE 2007. 14th Working Conference on}, keywords = {code, comments, evolution, reverseengineering}, pages = {70--79}, posted-at = {2008-02-29 00:05:42}, priority = {2}, title = {Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.2007.21}, year = {2007} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:2445535 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2445535 TI - Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes T2 - Reverse Engineering, 2007. WCRE 2007. 14th Working Conference on JF - Reverse Engineering, 2007. WCRE 2007. 14th Working Conference on SP - 70 EP - 79 N2 - Comments are valuable especially for program under- standing and maintenance, but do developers comment their code? To which extent do they add comments or adapt them when they evolve the code? We examine the question whether source code and associated comments are really changed together along the evolutionary history of a soft- ware system. In this paper, we describe an approach to map code and comments to observe their co-evolution over mul- tiple versions. We investigated three open source systems (i.e., ArgoUML, Azureus, and JDT Core) and describe how comments and code co-evolved over time. Some of our find- ings show that: 1) newly added code--despite its growth rate--barely gets commented; 2) class and method decla- rations are commented most frequently but far less, for ex- ample, method calls; and 3) that 97% of comment changes are done in the same revision as the associated source code change. KW - code KW - comments KW - evolution KW - reverseengineering AU - Fluri, Beat AU - Wursch, Michael AU - Gall, Harald PY - 2007/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.2007.21 ER -