[2403.00251] Are your comments outdated? Towards automatically detecting code-comment consistency
Skip to main content
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation, member institutions, and all contributors. Donate
arXiv logo
Cornell University Logo

Computer Science > Software Engineering

arXiv:2403.00251 (cs)
[Submitted on 1 Mar 2024]

Title:Are your comments outdated? Towards automatically detecting code-comment consistency

Authors:Yuan Huang, Yinan Chen, Xiangping Chen, Xiaocong Zhou
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:In software development and maintenance, code comments can help developers understand source code, and improve communication among developers. However, developers sometimes neglect to update the corresponding comment when changing the code, resulting in outdated comments (i.e., inconsistent codes and comments). Outdated comments are dangerous and harmful and may mislead subsequent developers. More seriously, the outdated comments may lead to a fatal flaw sometime in the future. To automatically identify the outdated comments in source code, we proposed a learning-based method, called CoCC, to detect the consistency between code and comment. To efficiently identify outdated comments, we extract multiple features from both codes and comments before and after they change. Besides, we also consider the relation between code and comment in our model. Experiment results show that CoCC can effectively detect outdated comments with precision over 90%. In addition, we have identified the 15 most important factors that cause outdated comments, and verified the applicability of CoCC in different programming languages. We also used CoCC to find outdated comments in the latest commits of open source projects, which further proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Subjects: Software Engineering (cs.SE)
Cite as: arXiv:2403.00251 [cs.SE]
  (or arXiv:2403.00251v1 [cs.SE] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.00251

Submission history

From: Yinan Chen [view email]
[v1] Fri, 1 Mar 2024 03:30:13 UTC (3,082 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

view license
Current browse context:
cs.SE
< prev   |   next >
new | recent | 2024-03
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

export BibTeX citation

Bookmark

BibSonomy logo Reddit logo

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?)
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Recommenders and Search Tools

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)