A Study on the Impact of Code Annotations on Software Evolution

The main aim of the project is to investigate and evaluate the impact of the use of code annotations on the evolution of software source code. In the first stage of the study, software repository mining techniques will be used to look for phenomena that occur with annotations in open source projects. Subsequently, controlled experiments will be carried out with developers to further investigate the impact of certain phenomena related to the use of annotations for understanding code and carrying out maintenance tasks.

In addition, this project also aims to make the results of these analyses more accessible to developers so that they can evaluate the use of annotations in their applications. This will be done through a tool that uses software visualization techniques. The idea is for it to present information about annotations in a visual way. It can be integrated into the developer's IDE or as a report in a continuous inspection tool.

Implementation of entire project can be found here: Code