Understanding the rationale for updating a function’s comment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Up-to-date comments are critical for the successful evolution of a software application. When modifying a function, developers may update the comment associated with the function or may not update it. For example, comments associated with a complex function are likely to be updated more often when the function is modified to prevent the code and the comments from drifting apart. Nevertheless, the rationale behind updating a comment has never been studied. In this paper, we present a large empirical study to better understand the rationale for updating comments. We recover the code change history for four large open source projects (GCC: a compiler, FreeBSD: an operation system, PostgreSQL: a database management system, and GCluster: a clustering framework) with an average code history of 10 years. Using the Random Forests algorithm, we investigate the rationale for updating comments along three dimensions: characteristics of the changed function, characteristics of the change itself and time and code ownership characteristics. Our case study shows that we can predict with an accuracy of 80%; the likelihood of updating the comment associated with a modified function. We perform a sensitivity analysis to determine the most important attributes. Our analysis shows that the percentage of changed call dependencies and control statements, the age of the modified function and the number of co-changed functions which depend on it are the most important attributes in determining the likelihood of updating comments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it