How Programmers Comment When They Think Nobody's Watching
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Date
2014-04-17
Authors
Parent, Simon Benjamin Orion
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
Documentation is essential to software development. Experienced
programmers know this well from having worked with poorly documented
code. They wish to improve their documentation techniques and
habits, but there is little consensus for them to follow. Somehow,
the many different standards must be compared objectively. This
desire motivates my work, which aims to better understand existing
documentation practices.
This work focuses exclusively on comments within the program
code. Programming is a complex human activity, despite a widespread
misconception among programmers that writing code is a mechanical
process. This is especially true of comments, where programmers
express themselves freely. My work fills a gap in research on
software documentation by systematically investigating the comments
in a unique database of code written by programmers under natural
conditions.
The true variety of programming behaviour is surprising. But this
variety does not mean that the output of programmers is completely
arbitrary; there are patterns in this data, which my research aims
to understand.
This work makes three contributions:
A novel taxonomy of comments developed from the data, which to date
is the most thorough description of commenting behaviour actually
exhibited by programmers.
Empirical hypotheses regarding large scale commenting behaviour,
which were validated on separate test data. These hypotheses describe
underlying regularities in programming which appear to transcend
individual differences.
The database of code I collected, which has unique opportunities
for further research on software development, and is thus available
for use by other researchers.
Description
Keywords
computer science, software engineering, commenting