Investigating Type Declaration Mismatches in Python

Luca Pascarella; Achyudh Ram; Azqa  Nadeem; Dinesh Bisesser; Norman Knyazev; Alberto Bacchelli

doi:10.1109/MALTESQUE.2018.8368458

Investigating Type Declaration Mismatches in Python

Luca Pascarella, Achyudh Ram, Azqa Nadeem, Dinesh Bisesser, Norman Knyazev, Alberto Bacchelli

Software Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volume › Conference contribution › Scientific › peer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

75 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Past research provided evidence that developers making code changes sometimes omit to update the related documentation, thus creating inconsistencies that may contribute to faults and crashes. In dynamically typed languages, such as Python, an inconsistency in the documentation may lead to a mismatch in type declarations only visible at runtime.
With our study, we investigate how often the documentation is inconsistent in a sample of 239 methods from five Python open- source software projects. Our results highlight that more than 20% of the comments are either partially defined or entirely missing and that almost 1% of the methods in the analyzed projects contain type inconsistencies. Based on these results, we create a tool, PyID, to early detect type mismatches in Python documentation and we evaluate its performance with our oracle.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	2018 IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning Techniques for Software Quality Evaluation (MaLTeSQuE)
Place of Publication	Piscataway, NJ
Publisher	IEEE
Pages	43-48
Number of pages	6
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-5386-5920-5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/MALTESQUE.2018.8368458
Publication status	Published - 2018
Event	MaLTeSQuE 2018: 2nd Workshop on Machine Learning Techniques in Software Quality Evaluation - Campobasso, Italy Duration: 20 Mar 2018 → 20 Mar 2018 Conference number: 2 https://maltesque.github.io/

Workshop

Workshop	MaLTeSQuE 2018
Country/Territory	Italy
City	Campobasso
Period	20/03/18 → 20/03/18
Other	Collocated with SANER
Internet address	https://maltesque.github.io/

Bibliographical note

Accepted Author Manuscript

Keywords

Documentation
Python
Tools
Runtime
Computer crashes
Libraries

Access to Document

10.1109/MALTESQUE.2018.8368458

TUD-SERG-2018-005Accepted author manuscript, 189 KB

Cite this

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title = "Investigating Type Declaration Mismatches in Python",

abstract = "Past research provided evidence that developers making code changes sometimes omit to update the related documentation, thus creating inconsistencies that may contribute to faults and crashes. In dynamically typed languages, such as Python, an inconsistency in the documentation may lead to a mismatch in type declarations only visible at runtime.With our study, we investigate how often the documentation is inconsistent in a sample of 239 methods from five Python open- source software projects. Our results highlight that more than 20% of the comments are either partially defined or entirely missing and that almost 1% of the methods in the analyzed projects contain type inconsistencies. Based on these results, we create a tool, PyID, to early detect type mismatches in Python documentation and we evaluate its performance with our oracle.",

keywords = "Documentation, Python, Tools, Runtime, Computer crashes, Libraries",

author = "Luca Pascarella and Achyudh Ram and Azqa Nadeem and Dinesh Bisesser and Norman Knyazev and Alberto Bacchelli",

note = "Accepted Author Manuscript; MaLTeSQuE 2018 : 2nd Workshop on Machine Learning Techniques in Software Quality Evaluation ; Conference date: 20-03-2018 Through 20-03-2018",

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doi = "10.1109/MALTESQUE.2018.8368458",

language = "English",

pages = "43--48",

booktitle = "2018 IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning Techniques for Software Quality Evaluation (MaLTeSQuE)",

publisher = "IEEE",

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T1 - Investigating Type Declaration Mismatches in Python

AU - Pascarella, Luca

AU - Ram, Achyudh

AU - Nadeem, Azqa

AU - Bisesser, Dinesh

AU - Knyazev, Norman

AU - Bacchelli, Alberto

N1 - Conference code: 2

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - Past research provided evidence that developers making code changes sometimes omit to update the related documentation, thus creating inconsistencies that may contribute to faults and crashes. In dynamically typed languages, such as Python, an inconsistency in the documentation may lead to a mismatch in type declarations only visible at runtime.With our study, we investigate how often the documentation is inconsistent in a sample of 239 methods from five Python open- source software projects. Our results highlight that more than 20% of the comments are either partially defined or entirely missing and that almost 1% of the methods in the analyzed projects contain type inconsistencies. Based on these results, we create a tool, PyID, to early detect type mismatches in Python documentation and we evaluate its performance with our oracle.

AB - Past research provided evidence that developers making code changes sometimes omit to update the related documentation, thus creating inconsistencies that may contribute to faults and crashes. In dynamically typed languages, such as Python, an inconsistency in the documentation may lead to a mismatch in type declarations only visible at runtime.With our study, we investigate how often the documentation is inconsistent in a sample of 239 methods from five Python open- source software projects. Our results highlight that more than 20% of the comments are either partially defined or entirely missing and that almost 1% of the methods in the analyzed projects contain type inconsistencies. Based on these results, we create a tool, PyID, to early detect type mismatches in Python documentation and we evaluate its performance with our oracle.

KW - Documentation

KW - Python

KW - Tools

KW - Runtime

KW - Computer crashes

KW - Libraries

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DO - 10.1109/MALTESQUE.2018.8368458

M3 - Conference contribution

SP - 43

EP - 48

BT - 2018 IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning Techniques for Software Quality Evaluation (MaLTeSQuE)

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Investigating Type Declaration Mismatches in Python

Abstract

Workshop

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Access to Document

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