Abstract
Context: Recent studies empirically revealed a relationship between source code comments and code quality. Some studies showed well-written source code comments could be a sign of problematic methods. Other studies also show that source code files with comments confessing a technical debt (called self-admitted technical debt, SATD) could be fixed more times. The former studies only considered the amount of comments, and their findings might be due to a specific type of comments, namely, SATD comments used in the latter studies. Objective: To clarify the relationship between comments other than SATD comments and code quality. Method: Replicate a part of the latter studies with such comments of methods on four OSS projects. Results: At both the file-level and the method-level, the presence of comments could be related to more code fixings even if the comments were not SATD comments. However, SATD comments were more effective to spot fix-prone files and methods than the non-SATD comments. Conclusions: Source code comments other than SATD comments could still be a sign of problematic code. This study demonstrates a need for further analysis on the contents of comments and its relation to code quality.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions on the first version of this paper. This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant #16K00099.
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Miyake, Y., Amasaki, S., Aman, H., Yokogawa, T. (2017). A Replicated Study on Relationship Between Code Quality and Method Comments. In: Lee, R. (eds) Applied Computing and Information Technology. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 695. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51472-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51472-7_2
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