HotComments: How to Make Program Comments More Useful?

Program comments have long been used as a common practice for improving inter-programmer communication and code readability, by explicitly specifying programmers' intentions and assumptions. Unfortunately, comments are not used to their maximum potential, as since most comments are written in natural language, it is very difficult to automatically analyze them. Furthermore, unlike source code, comments cannot be tested. As a result, incorrect or obsolete comments can mislead programmers and introduce new bugs later. This position paper takes an initiative to investigate how to explore comments beyond their current usage. Specifically, we study the feasibility and benefits of automatically analyzing comments to detect software bugs and bad comments. Our feasibility and benefit analysis is conducted from three aspects using Linux as a demonstration case. First, we study comments' characteristics and found that a significant percentage of comments are about "hot topics&quo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HOTOS
• Authors: Lin Tan, Ding Yuan, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: HOTOS 2007, Inconsistent Comments, Obsolete Comments, Operating System, Program Comments