Toward an understanding of the relationship between the identifier and comment lexicons

Authors:
Brian P. Eddy;Nicholas A. Kraft
Affiliations:
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL;The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL
Venue:
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Southeast Regional Conference
Year:
2011

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Abstract

Source code retrieval techniques show efficacy in the automation of software understanding activities, but the literature provides no guidance regarding the impact of comments on the performance of these techniques. In this paper we present an initial investigation of the effects of using comments in the source code retrieval process. We address our research question using a case study of six open source Java projects. The results indicate that the inclusion of comments significantly affects the average keyword density for a project. Future work includes analyzing the extent to which comments affect the average keyword density of domain terms and non-domain terms.