Infusing Topic Modeling into Interactive Program Comprehension: An Empirical Study

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianxia Wang ◽  
Yan Liu
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
Program Comprehension ◽  
Interactive Program

scholarly journals What do class comments tell us? An investigation of comment evolution and practices in Pharo Smalltalk

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pooja Rani ◽  
Sebastiano Panichella ◽  
Manuel Leuenberger ◽  
Mohammad Ghafari ◽  
Oscar Nierstrasz
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Programming Languages ◽  
Program Comprehension ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Support Program ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Similar Code

Abstract Context Previous studies have characterized code comments in various programming languages, showing how high quality of code comments is crucial to support program comprehension activities, and to improve the effectiveness of maintenance tasks. However, very few studies have focused on understanding developer practices to write comments. None of them has compared such developer practices to the standard comment guidelines to study the extent to which developers follow the guidelines. Objective Therefore, our goal is to investigate developer commenting practices and compare them to the comment guidelines. Method This paper reports the first empirical study investigating commenting practices in Pharo Smalltalk. First, we analyze class comment evolution over seven Pharo versions. Then, we quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the information types embedded in class comments. Finally, we study the adherence of developer commenting practices to the official class comment template over Pharo versions. Results Our results show that there is a rapid increase in class comments in the initial three Pharo versions, while in subsequent versions developers added comments to both new and old classes, thus maintaining a similar code to comment ratio. We furthermore found three times as many information types in class comments as those suggested by the template. However, the information types suggested by the template tend to be present more often than other types of information. Additionally, we find that a substantial proportion of comments follow the writing style of the template in writing these information types, but they are written and formatted in a non-uniform way. Conclusion The results suggest the need to standardize the commenting guidelines for formatting the text, and to provide headers for the different information types to ensure a consistent style and to identify the information easily. Given the importance of high-quality code comments, we draw numerous implications for developers and researchers to improve the support for comment quality assessment tools.

Boosting algorithms with topic modeling for multi-label text categorization: A comparative empirical study

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 732-746 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bassam Al-Salemi ◽  
Mohd. Juzaiddin Ab Aziz ◽  
Shahrul Azman Noah
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
Text Categorization ◽  
Boosting Algorithms

Using Concept Maps to Assist Program Comprehension and Concept Location: An Empirical Study

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (03) ◽  
pp. 1250018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon A. Wilson ◽  
Maksym Petrenko ◽  
Václav Rajlich
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Concept Maps ◽  
User Study ◽  
Software Evolution ◽  
Program Comprehension ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Software Change ◽  
Concept Location ◽  
Large Software ◽  
Software Evolution And Maintenance

Program comprehension is an integral part of the evolution and maintenance of large software systems. As it is increasingly difficult to comprehend these systems completely, programmers have to rely on a partial and as-needed comprehension. We study partial comprehension and programmer learning with the use of concept maps as a tool for capturing programmer knowledge during concept location, which is one of the tasks of software evolution and maintenance, and it is a prerequisite of a software change. We conduct a user study to measure the performance of programmers using concept maps to assist with locating concepts. The results demonstrate that programmer learning occurs during concept location and that concept maps assisted programmers with capturing programmer learning and successful concept location.

scholarly journals A large scale empirical study of the impact of Spaghetti Code and Blob anti-patterns on program comprehension

2020 ◽  
Vol 122 ◽  
pp. 106278
Author(s):  
Cristiano Politowski ◽  
Foutse Khomh ◽  
Simone Romano ◽  
Giuseppe Scanniello ◽  
Fabio Petrillo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Program Comprehension ◽  
The Impact
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document