Overview of Research on Code Annotation Evolution and Classification

Abstract:
Code comments are an integral part of the software source code, which contains low-level information about the functions of the software source code, usually a brief description of the programmer's assumptions and intentions, and is an effective way to assist related software developers in understanding the software source code.As an extended branch of program understanding, code comments are even more important in the fields of software development, maintenance, refactoring, reuse, and reverse engineering. In order to make better use of code comments and give full play to their role, it is necessary to deeply understand code comments, analyze the development of code comments and the purpose of adding comments by software programmers, and explore the co-evolutionary relationship between code comments and source code. The different uses of code comments, summarize the evolution and classification of source code comments, and analyze its related methods, and put forward the current problems and future directions in this research field through sorting and summarizing.