Analyzing the inconsistency between comments and source code in Pharo

Introduction

In Pharo, as in many other programming languages, method/class comments represent a useful source of information to understand the responsibilities of a given class.

Problem

However, these comments tend to be often incomplete or inconsistent with the source code. Due to software evolution, class descriptions get out of sync with the source code.

Aim

The aim of the project is to analyze code and comments of methods/classes in Pharo to generate class descriptions in natural language and study the inconsistency between source code and its comments.

State of the art

Comments are written in natural language. In recent research, the techniques to analyze the comments, are based on noun phrase analysis, dependency analysis, and semantic analysis. All of them could be used to extract significant information out of comments.

Steps

Contact

Pooja Rani