Comments on Comments: Where Code Review and Documentation Meet
Mon 23 May 2022 14:15 - 14:23 at Room 315+316 - Blended Technical Session 2 (Machine Learning and Information Retrieval) Chair(s): Preetha Chatterjee
An important function of code review is to increase understanding; helping reviewers understand a code change aides in knowledge transfer and finding bugs. Comments in code largely serve a similar purpose, helping future readers understand the program. It is thus natural to study what happens when these two forms of understanding collide. We ask: what documentation-related comments do reviewers make and how do they affect understanding of the contribution? We analyze ca.~700K review comments on 2,000 (Java and Python) GitHub projects, and propose several filters to identify which comments are likely to be either in response to a change in documentation and/or a call for such a change. We identify 65K such cases. We next develop a taxonomy of the reviewer intents behind such “comments on comments”. We find that achieving a shared understanding of the code is key: reviewer comments most often focused on clarification, followed by pointing out issues to fix, such as typos and outdated comments. Curiously, clarifying comments were frequently suggested (often verbatim) by the reviewer, indicating a desire to persist their understanding acquired during code review. We conclude with a discussion of implications of our comments-on-comments dataset for research on improving code review, including the potential benefits for automating code review.
Comments On Comments: Where Code Review and Documentation Meet (296-Tech-Rao.mp4) | 6.92MiB |
Tue 17 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
Mon 23 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
13:30 - 15:00 | Blended Technical Session 2 (Machine Learning and Information Retrieval) Technical Papers / Data and Tool Showcase Track at Room 315+316 Chair(s): Preetha Chatterjee Drexel University, USA | ||
13:30 15mTalk | Methods for Stabilizing Models across Large Samples of Projects(with case studies on Predicting Defect and Project Health) Technical Papers Suvodeep Majumder North Carolina State University, Tianpei Xia North Carolina State University, Rahul Krishna North Carolina State University, Tim Menzies North Carolina State University Pre-print Media Attached | ||
13:45 15mTalk | GraphCode2Vec: Generic Code Embedding via Lexical and Program Dependence Analyses Technical Papers Wei Ma SnT, University of Luxembourg, Mengjie Zhao LMU Munich, Ezekiel Soremekun SnT, University of Luxembourg, Qiang Hu University of Luxembourg, Jie M. Zhang King's College London, Mike Papadakis University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Maxime Cordy University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Xiaofei Xie Singapore Management University, Singapore, Yves Le Traon University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg Pre-print | ||
14:00 15mTalk | Senatus: A Fast and Accurate Code-to-Code Recommendation Engine Technical Papers Fran Silavong JP Morgan Chase & Co., Sean Moran JP Morgan Chase & Co., Antonios Georgiadis JP Morgan Chase & Co., Rohan Saphal JP Morgan Chase & Co., Robert Otter JP Morgan Chase & Co. DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
14:15 8mShort-paper | Comments on Comments: Where Code Review and Documentation Meet Technical Papers Nikitha Rao Carnegie Mellon University, Jason Tsay IBM Research, Martin Hirzel IBM Research, Vincent J. Hellendoorn Carnegie Mellon University DOI Pre-print File Attached | ||
14:23 8mShort-paper | On the Naturalness of Fuzzer Generated Code Technical Papers Rajeswari Hita Kambhamettu Carnegie Mellon University, John Billos Wake Forest University, Carolyn "Tomi" Oluwaseun-Apo Pennsylvania State University, Benjamin Gafford Carnegie Mellon University, Rohan Padhye Carnegie Mellon University, Vincent J. Hellendoorn Carnegie Mellon University | ||
14:31 8mTalk | SOSum: A Dataset of Stack Overflow Post Summaries Data and Tool Showcase Track Bonan Kou Purdue University, Yifeng Di Purdue University, Muhao Chen University of Southern California, Tianyi Zhang Purdue University | ||
14:39 21mLive Q&A | Discussions and Q&A Technical Papers |