Toward Automatic Summarization of Arbitrary Java Statements for Novice Programmers

Abstract

Novice programmers sometimes need to understand code written by others. Unfortunately, most software projects lack comments suitable for novices. The lack of comments have been addressed through automated techniques of generating comments based on program statements. However, these techniques lacked the context of how these statements function since they were aimed toward experienced programmers. In this paper, we present a novel technique towards automatically generating comments for Java statements suitable for novice programmers. Our technique not only goes beyond existing approaches to method summarization to meet the needs of novices, it also leverages API documentation when available. In an experimental study of 30 computer science undergraduate students, we observed explanations based on our technique to be preferred over an existing approach.