The Effect of Generated Comments for Integration Tests on Code Comprehension

Master thesis (2016)

Contributors

A.E. Zaidman (mentor)
Department
Software Technology (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2016 van der Schrier, E.D.
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Published Date

15-09-2016

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Abstract

Comments play a vital role in the comprehension of source code. To aid software developers in code comprehension, tools have been designed for automatically generating comments. However, developers lack a tool that creates comments for integration tests. To further improve the process of code comprehension, a novel tool is proposed in this thesis based on TestDescriber for automatically generating comments for integration tests. For the design, the main stages in the process of generating comments are defined. An experiment is conducted to evaluate the tool with Java developers. Two programming tasks had to be performed, in which a test had to be rewritten. The results show that the generated comments from the tool can improve code comprehension.