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Source code that talks

A programmer performing a change task to a system can benefit from accurate comments on the source code. As part of good programming practice described by Kernighan and Pike in the book The Practice of Programming, comments should "aid the understanding of a program by briefly pointing out salient details or by providing a larger-scale view of the proceedings." In this paper, we explore the widely varying uses of comments in source code. We find that programmers not only use comments for describing the actual source code, but also use comments for many other purposes, such as "talking" to colleagues through the source code using a comment "Joan, please fix this method." This kind of comments can complicate the mining of project information because such team communication is often perceived to reside in separate archives, such as emails or newsgroup postings, rather than in the source code. Nevertheless, these and other types of comments can be very useful inputs for mining project information.