CrowdSummarizer: Automated Generation of Code Summaries for Java Programs through Crowdsourcing

To perform software maintenance, developers must have a relatively good understanding of the program's source code, which is often written by other developers. Code summaries, which describe a program's entities (for example, its methods), help developers better comprehend code more quickly. However, generating code summaries can be challenging. To mitigate this problem, CrowdSummarizer exploits crowdsourcing, gamification, and natural-language processing to automatically generate high-level summaries of Java program methods. Researchers have implemented it as an Eclipse plug-in together with a Web-based code summarization game that can be played by the crowd. Two empirical studies determined that CrowdSummarizer generates quality results. This article is part of a special issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering.