Classifying Code Comments in Java Open-Source Software Systems

Luca Pascarella; Alberto Bacchelli

doi:10.1109/MSR.2017.63

Classifying Code Comments in Java Open-Source Software Systems

Luca Pascarella, Alberto Bacchelli

Software Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volume › Conference contribution › Scientific › peer-review

75 Citations (Scopus)

375 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Code comments are a key software component containing information about the underlying implementation. Several studies have shown that code comments enhance the readability of the code. Nevertheless, not all the comments have the same goal and target audience. In this paper, we investigate how six diverse Java OSS projects use code comments, with the aim of understanding their purpose. Through our analysis, we produce a taxonomy of source code comments, subsequently, we investigate how often each category occur by manually classifying more than 2,000 code comments from the aforementioned projects. In addition, we conduct an initial evaluation on how to automatically classify code comments at line level into our taxonomy using machine learning, initial results are promising and suggest that an accurate classification is within reach.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings - 2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2017
Place of Publication	Los Alamitos, CA
Publisher	IEEE
Pages	227-237
Number of pages	11
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-5386-1544-7
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR.2017.63
Publication status	Published - 2017
Event	MSR 2017: 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories - Buenos Aires, Argentina Duration: 20 May 2017 → 21 May 2017 Conference number: 14 http://2017.msrconf.org/#/home

Conference

Conference	MSR 2017
Abbreviated title	MSR
Country/Territory	Argentina
City	Buenos Aires
Period	20/05/17 → 21/05/17
Internet address	http://2017.msrconf.org/#/home

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgments: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 642954

Keywords

comment taxonomy
software quality
source code comments

Access to Document

10.1109/MSR.2017.63

Classifying code comments in Java open-source software systemsAccepted author manuscript, 433 KB

Cite this

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title = "Classifying Code Comments in Java Open-Source Software Systems",

abstract = "Code comments are a key software component containing information about the underlying implementation. Several studies have shown that code comments enhance the readability of the code. Nevertheless, not all the comments have the same goal and target audience. In this paper, we investigate how six diverse Java OSS projects use code comments, with the aim of understanding their purpose. Through our analysis, we produce a taxonomy of source code comments, subsequently, we investigate how often each category occur by manually classifying more than 2,000 code comments from the aforementioned projects. In addition, we conduct an initial evaluation on how to automatically classify code comments at line level into our taxonomy using machine learning, initial results are promising and suggest that an accurate classification is within reach.",

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Classifying Code Comments in Java Open-Source Software Systems. / Pascarella, Luca; Bacchelli, Alberto.
Proceedings - 2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2017. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE, 2017. p. 227-237 7962372.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volume › Conference contribution › Scientific › peer-review

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Classifying Code Comments in Java Open-Source Software Systems

Abstract

Conference

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Access to Document

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