Generating Code Summaries Using the Power of the Crowd

TL;DR

This paper presents CrowdSummarizer, a platform that uses crowdsourcing, gamification, and NLP to automatically generate high-quality code summaries for Java methods, aiding developers in understanding code more efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a novel crowdsourcing-based approach for code summarization, implemented as an Eclipse plugin and web game, demonstrating effectiveness through empirical evaluation.

Findings

CrowdSummarizer produces high-quality code summaries.

The platform is effective and applicable in real-world scenarios.

Crowdsourcing improves the quality of automated code summaries.

Abstract

One of the first steps to perform most of the software maintenance activities, such as updating features or fixing bugs, is to have a relatively good understanding of the program's source code which is often written by other developers. A code summary is a description about a program's entities (e.g., its methods) which helps developers have a better comprehension of the code in a shorter period of time. However, generating code summaries can be a challenging task. To mitigate this problem, in this article, we introduce CrowdSummarizer, a code summarization platform that benefits from the concepts of crowdsourcing, gamification, and natural language processing to automatically generate a high level summary for the methods of a Java program. We have implemented CrowdSummarizer as an Eclipse plugin together with a web-based code summarization game that can be played by the crowd. The results of two empirical studies that evaluate the applicability of the approach and the quality of generated summaries indicate that CrowdSummarizer is effective in generating quality results.