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During maintenance, understanding the source code is required to determine the part that is relevant to the current task. Usually, software developers and engineers depend on source code comments and documentation to understand the code. Unfortunately, descriptive comments are often outdated or not exist. Summarizing the source code automatically can assist in getting over the unavailability of the manually written comments. This paper proposes a technique to automatically generate natural language summaries for software classes written in object-oriented programming languages. The technique parses the program's source code and identifies the stereotype for the target class and its corresponding methods. A set of predefined heuristics are proposed to select the methods that should be reflected in the generated summaries. A case study has been conducted to validate the proposed technique. Results indicated that the generated summaries provide concise and accurate contextual information about the class and help the developers in understanding their source code.
Inspec keywords: software maintenance; natural language processing; object-oriented programming; system documentation; source code (software)
Subjects: Software engineering techniques; Object-oriented programming; Natural language interfaces