9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay
Links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, and source code repositories are no exception. However, despite their many undisputed benefits, links can suffer from decay, insufficient versioning, and lack of bidirectional traceability. In this paper, we investigate the role of links containe...
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sg-smu-ink.sis_research-98042024-05-30T07:56:36Z 9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay HATA, Hideaki TREUDE, Christoph KULA, Raula Gaikovina ISHIO, Takashi Links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, and source code repositories are no exception. However, despite their many undisputed benefits, links can suffer from decay, insufficient versioning, and lack of bidirectional traceability. In this paper, we investigate the role of links contained in source code comments from these perspectives. We conducted a large-scale study of around 9.6 million links to establish their prevalence, and we used a mixed-methods approach to identify the links' targets, purposes, decay, and evolutionary aspects. We found that links are prevalent in source code repositories, that licenses, software homepages, and specifications are common types of link targets, and that links are often included to provide metadata or attribution. Links are rarely updated, but many link targets evolve. Almost 10% of the links included in source code comments are dead. We then submitted a batch of link-fixing pull requests to open source software repositories, resulting in most of our fixes being merged successfully. Our findings indicate that links in source code comments can indeed be fragile, and our work opens up avenues for future work to address these problems. 2019-05-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8801 info:doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00123 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9804/viewcontent/icse19a.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University code comment knowledge sharing link decay Software Engineering |
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code comment knowledge sharing link decay Software Engineering HATA, Hideaki TREUDE, Christoph KULA, Raula Gaikovina ISHIO, Takashi 9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay |
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Links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, and source code repositories are no exception. However, despite their many undisputed benefits, links can suffer from decay, insufficient versioning, and lack of bidirectional traceability. In this paper, we investigate the role of links contained in source code comments from these perspectives. We conducted a large-scale study of around 9.6 million links to establish their prevalence, and we used a mixed-methods approach to identify the links' targets, purposes, decay, and evolutionary aspects. We found that links are prevalent in source code repositories, that licenses, software homepages, and specifications are common types of link targets, and that links are often included to provide metadata or attribution. Links are rarely updated, but many link targets evolve. Almost 10% of the links included in source code comments are dead. We then submitted a batch of link-fixing pull requests to open source software repositories, resulting in most of our fixes being merged successfully. Our findings indicate that links in source code comments can indeed be fragile, and our work opens up avenues for future work to address these problems. |
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text |
author |
HATA, Hideaki TREUDE, Christoph KULA, Raula Gaikovina ISHIO, Takashi |
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HATA, Hideaki TREUDE, Christoph KULA, Raula Gaikovina ISHIO, Takashi |
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HATA, Hideaki |
title |
9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay |
title_short |
9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay |
title_full |
9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay |
title_fullStr |
9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay |
title_full_unstemmed |
9.6 million links in source code comments: Purpose, evolution, and decay |
title_sort |
9.6 million links in source code comments: purpose, evolution, and decay |
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Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University |
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2019 |
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https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8801 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9804/viewcontent/icse19a.pdf |
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