DocumentTag: Source Code Documentation Environment to Support Program Comprehension

Object-Oriented Programming provides several mechanisms such as encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism for developers to hide implementation detail of a functional unit. Developers who want to inspect precise behavior of a module have to inspect a number of modules that related to the module using class hierarchy and method call relation. While many approaches are proposed to support program comprehension, a few tools focus on documen- tation of the result of comprehension tasks. In this paper, we propose a new documentation named DocumentTag for developers to write a document for an identifier. DocumentTag has propagation rules that propagates the doc- ument of an identifier to other related identifiers. We have implemented DocumentTag as an Eclipse plug-in and conducted a case study. The result shows that DocumentTag effectively provides documents to developers.