Automatically Documenting Software Artifacts

Software artifacts constantly change during evolution and maintenance of software systems. One critical artifact that developers need to be able to maintain during evolution and maintenance of software systems is up-to-date and complete documentation. However, recent studies on the co-evolution of comments and code showed that the comments are rarely maintained or updated when the respective source code is changed. In order to understand developer practices regarding documenting two kinds of software artifacts, unit test cases and database-related operations, we designed two empirical studies both composed of (i) an online survey with contributors of open source projects and (ii) a mining-based analysis of method comments in these projects. Later, motivated by the findings of the studies, we proposed two novel approaches. UnitTestScribe is an approach for automatically documenting test cases, while DBScribe is an approach for automatically documenting test cases. We evaluated our tools by means of an online survey with industrial developers and graduate students. In general, participants indicated that descriptions generated by our tools are complete, concise, and easy to read.