Examining the evolution of code comments in PostgreSQL

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Examining the evolution of code comments in PostgreSQL

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International Conference on Software Engineering archive
Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories table of contents

Shanghai, China

SESSION: MSR-challenge report table of contents

Pages: 179 - 180

Year of Publication: 2006

ISBN:1-59593-397-2

Authors

Zhen Ming Jiang	University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
Ahmed E. Hassan	University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 3, Downloads (12 Months): 34, Citation Count: 5

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ABSTRACT

It is common, especially in large software systems, for developers to change code without updating its associated comments due to their unfamiliarity with the code or due to time constraints. This is a potential problem since outdated comments may confuse or mislead developers who perform future development. Using data recovered from CVS, we study the evolution of code comments in the PostgreSQL project. Our study reveals that over time the percentage of commented functions remains constant except for early fluctuation due to the commenting style of a particular active developer.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	R. Fjeldstad and W. Hamlen. Application program maintenance-report to our respondents. In Tutorial On Software Maintenance, pages 13--27.1983.
	2	A. E. Hassan and R. C. Holt. C-REX: An Evolutionary Code Extractor for C. May 2004.
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CITED BY 5

	Lin Tan , Ding Yuan , Yuanyuan Zhou, Hotcomments: how to make program comments more useful?, Proceedings of the 11th USENIX workshop on Hot topics in operating systems, p.1-6, May 07-09, 2007, San Diego, CA
	Lin Tan , Ding Yuan , Gopal Krishna , Yuanyuan Zhou, /icomment: bugs or bad comments?/, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.41 n.6, December 2007
	Margaret-Anne Storey , Jody Ryall , R. Ian Bull , Del Myers , Janice Singer, TODO or to bug: exploring how task annotations play a role in the work practices of software developers, Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering, May 10-18, 2008, Leipzig, Germany
	Yoann Padioleau , Lin Tan , Yuanyuan Zhou, Listening to programmers Taxonomies and characteristics of comments in operating system code, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, p.331-341, May 16-24, 2009
	Beat Fluri , Michael Würsch , Emanuel Giger , Harald C. Gall, Analyzing the co-evolution of comments and source code, Software Quality Control, v.17 n.4, p.367-394, December 2009