A Human Study of Comprehension and Code Summarization

This page contains code for the survey instrument we deployed in support of A Human Study of Comprehension and Code Summarization (link forthcoming)


Our work studied the effect of machine-generated code summaries on software developer's program comprehension. We conducted an online survey that provided participants with Java code snippets and asked them to complete three tasks: (1) Answer a series of questions that assessed their comprehension of the code snippets (2) Write the code for a class method given a description of the functionality, its other class methods and their corresponding summaries (3) Find and fix a bug in a code snippet given only its code summary, its other class methods and their corresponding summaries. For each code snippet in the survey, participants were randomly assigned either human-generated or machine-generated summaries.


You can find further information about our method and results in the paper.


Downloads

Master zip file: Zip file

Publication

Please cite our work as the following

@inproceedings{,

    title = {A Human Study of Comprehension and Code Summarization},

    author = {Stapleton, Sean and Gambhir, Yashmeet and LeClair, Alexander and Eberhart, Zachary and Weimer, Westley and Leach, Kevin and Huang, Yu},

    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension},

    series = {ICPC'20},

    year = {2020},

    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}

}

License

This project is listed under MIT License Copyright (c) 2019

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:


The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.


THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Contact

Please get in touch if you have any questions:

kjleach at umich dot edu