Summarization of Software Artifacts: a Review

Summarization of software artifacts is an ongoing field of research among the software engineering community due to the benefits that summarization provides like saving of time and efforts in various software engineering tasks like code search, duplicate bug reports detection, traceability link recovery, etc. Summarization is to produce short and concise summaries. The paper presents the review of the state of the art of summarization techniques in software engineering context. The paper gives a brief overview to the software artifacts which are mostly used for summarization or have benefits from summarization. The paper briefly describes the general process of summarization. The paper reviews the papers published from 2010 to June 2017 and classifies the works into extractive and abstractive summarization. The paper also reviews the evaluation techniques used for summarizing software artifacts. The paper discusses the open problems and challenges in this field of research. The paper also discusses the future scopes in this area for new researchers.