Preliminary Report on Empirical Study of Repeated Fragments in Internal Documentation
Milan Nosáľ, Jaroslav Porubän · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2016
In this paper we present preliminary results of an empirical study, in which we used copy/paste detection (PMD CPD implementation) to search for repeating documentation fragments.The study was performed on 5 open source projects, including Java 8 SDK sources.The study shows that there are many occurrences of copy-pasting documentation fragments in the internal documentation, e.g., copy-pasted method parameter description.Besides these, many of the copy-pasted fragments express some domain or design concern, e.g., that the method is obsolete and deprecated.Therefore the study indicates that the cross-cutting concerns are present in the internal documentation in form of documentation phrases.