Recording concerns in source code using annotations

Abstract

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two controlled experiments, we seek to answer the following 3 research questions: 1) Do programmers' mental models overlap? 2) How do developers use shared concern annotations when they are available? 3) Does using annotations created by others improve program comprehension and maintenance correctness, time and confidence? The first study shows that developers' mental models, recorded using concern annotations, overlap and thus can be shared. The second study shows that shared concern annotations can be used during program comprehension for the following purposes: hypotheses confirmation, feature location, obtaining new knowledge, finding relationships and maintenance notes.The first controlled experiment with students showed that the presence of annotations significantly reduced program comprehension and maintenance time by 34%. The second controlled experiment was a differentiated replication of the first one, focused on industrial developers. It showed a 33% significant improvement in correctness. We conclude that concern annotations are a viable way to share developers' thoughts.

Labeling Source Code with Metadata: A Survey and Taxonomy

“…A concern is a piece of information about a code element, such as a feature it implements or a design decision [32]. Con-cernMapper [14] is both an Eclipse plugin and a framework to associate parts of programs with concerns, both through a GUI (graphical user interface) and an API (application programming interface).…”

μ -DSU: A Micro-Language Based Approach to Dynamic Software Updating

“…Automation of this task is, therefore, desirable and is part of on-going investigations. The easiest way should consist of asking the developer to decorate the code with meta-data about the piece of code that belongs to a particular application feature; similarly to what was done in [31,32]. This approach would help with the maintenance issue but it still requires some manual identification with all the problems this entails.…”

Exposing Runtime Information through Source Code Annotations

“…Although in more realistic use cases, the number is expected to grow, it should not affect readability significantly. In controlled experiments [14], we showed that feature (and other concern) annotations are useful when shared with other developers -they improve program comprehension efficiency. Nevertheless, keeping annotations synchronized with source code changes could be challenging.…”

“…Concern annotations [12,14] are annotations acting as hints for developers, informing them about intentions behind a code element. Originally, they were intended to be inserted manually into the source code, preferably by programmers writing the code.…”