Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
Software Engineering: Theory and Practice
Software Engineering: Theory and Practice
An Effect of Comment Statements on Source Code Corrective Maintenance
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering: Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering
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Comment statements written in a source code are important information to understand and to maintain the source code. This paper performs an empirical study of impacts of comment statements on source code stability in an open source development. The study collected 4,521 source code and their version-upgrade data from a major open source software project, Eclipse. The empirical results show the following findings: (1) a source code with a high comment-density (about more than 40%) has a tendency to be stable through the upgrdes, but (2) a source code with frequently-written comments has the opposite tendency. This work thus concludes that describing many comments is recommend for developing a stable code, but frequently describing comments is discouraged.