An Empirical Analysis on Fault-Proneness of Well-Commented Modules

Comment statements are useful to enhance the readability and/or understandability of software modules. However, some comments may adjust the readability/understandability of code fragments that are too complicated and hard to understand-a kind of code smell. Consequently, some well-written comments may be signs of poorquality modules. This paper focuses on the lines of comments written in modules, and performs an empirical analysis with three major open source software and their fault data. The empirical results show that the risk of being faulty in wellcommented modules is about 2 to 8 times greater than noncommented modules.