9.6 million links in source code comments: purpose, evolution, and decay
Date
2019
Authors
Hata, H.
Treude, C.
Kula, R.G.
Ishio, T.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Conference paper
Citation
International Conference on Software Engineering, 2019, vol.2019-May, pp.1211-1221
Statement of Responsibility
Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Takashi Ishio
Conference Name
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (25 May 2019 - 31 May 2019 : Montreal, Canada)
Abstract
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.
School/Discipline
Dissertation Note
Provenance
Description
Access Status
Rights
© IEEE