Towards a Taxonomy of Inline Code Comment Smells

Code comments play a vital role in source code comprehension and software maintainability. It is common for developers to write comments for explaining a code snippet. However, low-quality comments can have a detrimental effect on software quality or be ineffective for code understanding. This study aims to create a taxonomy of inline code comment smells and determine how commonly each smell type occurs in software projects. We conducted a multivocal literature review for defining the initial taxonomy of inline comment smells. Afterward, we manually labeled 899 inline comments from three open-source Java projects. We created a taxonomy of 11 inline code comment smell types and found out that the smells exist in practice with varying degrees.