ABSTRACT / * iComment: Bugs or Bad Comments? */
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@MISC{Tan_abstract/,
author = {Lin Tan and Ding Yuan and Gopal Krishna and Yuanyuan Zhou},
title = {ABSTRACT / * iComment: Bugs or Bad Comments? */},
year = {}
}
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Abstract
Commenting source code has long been a common practice in software development. Compared to source code, comments are more direct, descriptive and easy-to-understand. Comments and source code provide relatively redundant and independent information regarding a program’s semantic behavior. As software evolves, they can easily grow out-of-sync, indicating two problems: (1) bugs-the source code does not follow the assumptions and requirements specified by correct program comments; (2) bad comments- comments that are inconsistent with correct code, which can confuse and mislead programmers to introduce bugs in subsequent versions. Unfortunately, as most comments are written in natural language, no solution has been proposed to automatically analyze comments and detect inconsistencies between comments and source code. This paper takes the first step in automatically analyzing comments written in natural language to extract implicit program rules and use these rules to automatically detect inconsistencies between comments and source code, indicating either bugs or bad comments. Our solution, iComment, combines Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, Statistics and Program Analysis techniques to achieve these goals. We evaluate iComment on four large code bases: Linux, Mozilla, Wine and Apache. Our experimental results show that iComment automatically extracts 1832 rules from comments with 90.8-100% accuracy and detects 60 comment-code inconsistencies, 33 new bugs and 27 bad comments, in the latest versions of the four programs. Nineteen of them (12 bugs and 7 bad comments) have already been confirmed by the corresponding developers while the others are currently being analyzed by the developers.
Keyphrases
bad comment source code abstract icomment natural language bugs-the source code independent information large code base correct code 8-100 accuracy corresponding developer new bug comment-code inconsistency program analysis technique natural language processing software evolves correct program comment bad comment comment subsequent version common practice program semantic behavior software development machine learning implicit program rule first step experimental result
