The Commenting Practice of Open Source Oliver Arafat Dirk Riehle Siemens AG, Corporate Technology SAP Research, SAP Labs LLC Otto-Hahn-Ring 6, 81739 München 3410 Hillview Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract lem domain is well understood [15]. Agile software devel- opment methods can cope with changing requirements and The development processes of open source software are poorly understood problem domains, but typically require different from traditional closed source development proc- co-location of developers and fail to scale to large project esses. Still, open source software is frequently of high sizes [16]. quality. This raises the question of how and why open A host of successful open source projects in both well source software creates high quality and whether it can and poorly understood problem domains and of small to maintain this quality for ever larger project sizes. In this large sizes suggests that open source can cope both with paper, we look at one particular quality indicator, the den- changing requirements and large project sizes. In this pa- sity of comments in open source software code. We find per we focus on one particular code metric, the comment that successful open source projects follow a consistent density, and assess it across 5,229 active open source pro- practice of documenting their source code, and we find jects, representing about 30% of all active open source that the comment density is independent of team and pro- projects. We show that commenting source code is an on- ject size. going and integrated practice of open source software de- velopment that is consistently found across all these pro- Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.8 [Metrics]: jects.