Documentation is essential to software development. Experiencedprogrammers know this well from having worked with poorly documentedcode. They wish to improve their documentation techniques andhabits, but there is little consensus for them to follow. Somehow,the many different standards must be compared objectively. Thisdesire motivates my work, which aims to better understand existingdocumentation practices.This work focuses exclusively on comments within the programcode. Programming is a complex human activity, despite a widespreadmisconception among programmers that writing code is a mechanicalprocess. This is especially true of comments, where programmersexpress themselves freely. My work fills a gap in research onsoftware documentation by systematically investigating the commentsin a unique database of code written by programmers under naturalconditions.The true variety of programming behaviour is surprising. But thisvariety does not mean that the output of programmers is completelyarbitrary; there are patterns in this data, which my research aimsto understand.This work makes three contributions:A novel taxonomy of comments developed from the data, which to dateis the most thorough description of commenting behaviour actuallyexhibited by programmers.Empirical hypotheses regarding large scale commenting behaviour,which were validated on separate test data. These hypotheses describeunderlying regularities in programming which appear to transcendindividual differences.The database of code I collected, which has unique opportunitiesfor further research on software development, and is thus availablefor use by other researchers.
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How Programmers Comment When They Think Nobody's Watching
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