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Automatically documenting program changes
Automatically documenting program changes   (Citations: 3)
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Source code modifications are often documented with log messages. Such messages are a key component of software maintenance: they can help developers validate changes, locate and triage defects, and understand modifications. However, this documentation can be burdensome to create and can be incomplete or inaccurate. We present an automatic technique for synthesizing succinct human-readable documentation for arbitrary program differences. Our algorithm is based on a combination of symbolic execution and a novel approach to code summarization. The documentation it produces describes the effect of a change on the runtime behavior of a program, including the conditions under which program behavior changes and what the new behavior is. We compare our documentation to 250 human-written log messages from 5 popular open source projects. Employing a human study, we find that our generated documentation is suitable for supplementing or replacing 89% of existing log messages that directly describe a code change.
Conference: Automated Software Engineering - ASE , pp. 33-42, 2010
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    • ...Buse and Weimer [4, 3] presented various automatic techniques for exception documentation and synthesizing documentation for arbitrary programme differences across versions...

    Lin Shiet al. An Empirical Study on Evolution of API Documentation

    • ...In addition, we are aware of other techniques that could be used towards generating comments for legacy code [21]‐ [24]...
    • ...However, these approaches are limited to inferring documentation for exceptions [21], generating API function cross-references [22], synthesizing method stereotype information [23] or producing documentation for program changes between versions [24]...

    Giriprasad Sridharaet al. Generating Parameter Comments and Integrating with Method Summaries

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