How Good is Your Comment? A Study of Comments in Java Programs

Comments are very useful to developers during maintenance tasks and are useful as well to help structuring a code at development time. They convey useful information about the system functionalities as well as the state of mind of a developer. Comments in code have been the focus of several studies, but none of them was targeted at analyzing commenting habits precisely. In this paper, we present an empirical study which analyzes existing comments in different open source Java projects. We study comments from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. We propose a taxonomy of comments that we used for conducting our analysis.