Investigating Type Declaration Mismatches in Python

Conference paper (2018)

Authors

L. Pascarella Software Engineering - EEMCS
A.R. Keshav Ram Software Engineering - EEMCS
Azqa Nadeem Student
Dinesh Bisesser Student
Norman Knyazev Student
A. Bacchelli University of Zürich
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2018 L. Pascarella, A.R. Keshav Ram, Azqa Nadeem, Dinesh Bisesser, Norman Knyazev, A. Bacchelli
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MALTESQUE.2018.8368458
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Published Date

2018

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Past research provided evidence that developers making code changes sometimes omit to update the related documentation, thus creating inconsistencies that may contribute to faults and crashes. In dynamically typed languages, such as Python, an inconsistency in the documentation may lead to a mismatch in type declarations only visible at runtime.
With our study, we investigate how often the documentation is inconsistent in a sample of 239 methods from five Python open- source software projects. Our results highlight that more than 20% of the comments are either partially defined or entirely missing and that almost 1% of the methods in the analyzed projects contain type inconsistencies. Based on these results, we create a tool, PyID, to early detect type mismatches in Python documentation and we evaluate its performance with our oracle.