Supporting Source Code Annotations with Metadata-Aware Development Environment

Abstract

To augment source code with high-level metadata with the intent to facilitate program comprehension, a programmer can use annotations. There are several types of annotations: either those put directly in the code or external ones. Each type comes with a unique workflow and inherent limitations. In this paper, we present a tool providing uniform annotation process, which also adds custom metadata-awareness for an industrial IDE. We also report an experiment in which we sought whether the created annotating support helps programmers to annotate code with comments faster and more consistently. The experiment showed that with the tool the annotating consistency was significantly higher but also that the increase in annotating speed was not statistically significant.