NDLI: Understanding the rationale for updating a function’s comment

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Malik, H. Chowdhury, I. Hsiao-Ming Tsou Zhen Ming Jiang Hassan, A.E.
Copyright Year	2008
Description	Author affiliation: Sch. of Comput., Queen's Univ., Kingston, ON (Malik, H.; Chowdhury, I.; Hsiao-Ming Tsou; Zhen Ming Jiang; Hassan, A.E.)
Abstract	Up-to-date comments are critical for the successful evolution of a software application. When modifying a function, developers may update the comment associated with the function or may not update it. For example, comments associated with a complex function are likely to be updated more often when the function is modified to prevent the code and the comments from drifting apart. Nevertheless, the rationale behind updating a comment has never been studied. In this paper, we present a large empirical study to better understand the rationale for updating comments. We recover the code change history for four large open source projects (GCC: a compiler, FreeBSD: an operation system, PostgreSQL: a database management system, and GCluster: a clustering framework) with an average code history of 10 years. Using the Random Forests algorithm, we investigate the rationale for updating comments along three dimensions: characteristics of the changed function, characteristics of the change itself and time and code ownership characteristics. Our case study shows that we can predict with an accuracy of 80%; the likelihood of updating the comment associated with a modified function. We perform a sensitivity analysis to determine the most important attributes. Our analysis shows that the percentage of changed call dependencies and control statements, the age of the modified function and the number of co-changed functions which depend on it are the most important attributes in determining the likelihood of updating comments.
Starting Page	167
Ending Page	176
File Size	135566
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781424426133
ISSN	10636773
DOI	10.1109/ICSM.2008.4658065
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2008-09-28
Publisher Place	China
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Prediction algorithms Accuracy Decision trees History Computer bugs Software Sensitivity analysis
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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