Summarizing Services of Java Packages

Abstract—Program comprehension is essential for code maintenance and evolution activities. It saves time and efforts of developers who want to perform any code changes. It also minimizes the chances of introducing bugs. Textual summaries for source code provide great help to code understanding activities. This paper presents an approach to automatically generate textual summaries for services implemented in java packages. The summary is generated by analyzing the source code of methods defined the package. Each method represents a service provide by the package. Each service is summarized as a natural language textual description. The generated summary for a method mainly includes the used data and the names of invoked methods. Summaries of all methods defined in a package are refined and integrated to be reported as a comprehensive summary for the services provided by the package. The generated summaries are useful in different ways. They can be used by developers in their maintenance activities. They also can be useful for the documentation purposes.

Index Terms—Program comprehension, software maintenance, source code summarization.

The authors are with the Department of Software Engineering, The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan (e-mail: mhammad@hu.edu.jo, abuljadyel1990@gmail.com, hamoodnooman@gmail.com).

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Cite: Maen Hammad, Anas Abuljadayel, and Mohammad Khalaf, "Summarizing Services of Java Packages," Lecture Notes on Software Engineering vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 129-132, 2016.