TL;DR
This study investigates how developers write class comments in Pharo Smalltalk, analyzing their evolution, content types, and adherence to guidelines to improve comment quality and standardization.
Contribution
It provides the first empirical analysis of commenting practices in Pharo Smalltalk, comparing them to official guidelines and highlighting areas for standardization.
Findings
Rapid increase in comments during initial versions
Comments contain three times more information types than guidelines
Many comments follow the template style but lack uniform formatting
Abstract
Previous studies have characterized code comments in various programming languages to support better program comprehension activities and maintenance tasks. However, very few studies have focused on understanding developer practices to write comments. None of them has compared such developer practices to the standard comment guidelines to study the extent to which developers follow the guidelines. This paper reports the first empirical study investigating commenting practices in Pharo Smalltalk. First, we analyze class comment evolution over seven Pharo versions. Then, we investigate the information types embedded in class comments. Finally, we study the adherence of developer commenting practices to the official class comment template over Pharo versions. The results of this study show that there is a rapid increase in class comments in the initial three Pharo versions, while in…
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