RepoSummary: Feature-Oriented Summarization and Documentation Generation for Code Repositories

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Yifeng, Zhao, Xianlin, Li, Xutian, Zou, Yanzhen, Yuan, Haizhuo, Wang, Yue, Xie, Bing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhu, Yifeng
Zhao, Xianlin
Li, Xutian
Zou, Yanzhen
Yuan, Haizhuo
Wang, Yue
Xie, Bing
author_facet Zhu, Yifeng
Zhao, Xianlin
Li, Xutian
Zou, Yanzhen
Yuan, Haizhuo
Wang, Yue
Xie, Bing
contents Repository summarization is a crucial research question in development and maintenance for software engineering. Existing repository summarization techniques primarily focus on summarizing code according to the directory tree, which is insufficient for tracing high-level features to the methods that collaboratively implement them. To address these limitations, we propose RepoSummary, a feature-oriented code repository summarization approach that simultaneously generates repository documentation automatically. Furthermore, it establishes more accurate traceability links from functional features to the corresponding code elements, enabling developers to rapidly locate relevant methods and files during code comprehension and maintenance. Comprehensive experiments against the state-of-the-art baseline (HGEN) demonstrate that RepoSummary achieves higher feature coverage and more accurate traceability. On average, it increases the rate of completely covered features in manual documentation from 61.2% to 71.1%, improves file-level traceability recall from 29.9% to 53.0%, and generates documentation that is more conceptually consistent, easier to understand, and better formatted than that produced by existing approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_11039
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RepoSummary: Feature-Oriented Summarization and Documentation Generation for Code Repositories
Zhu, Yifeng
Zhao, Xianlin
Li, Xutian
Zou, Yanzhen
Yuan, Haizhuo
Wang, Yue
Xie, Bing
Software Engineering
Repository summarization is a crucial research question in development and maintenance for software engineering. Existing repository summarization techniques primarily focus on summarizing code according to the directory tree, which is insufficient for tracing high-level features to the methods that collaboratively implement them. To address these limitations, we propose RepoSummary, a feature-oriented code repository summarization approach that simultaneously generates repository documentation automatically. Furthermore, it establishes more accurate traceability links from functional features to the corresponding code elements, enabling developers to rapidly locate relevant methods and files during code comprehension and maintenance. Comprehensive experiments against the state-of-the-art baseline (HGEN) demonstrate that RepoSummary achieves higher feature coverage and more accurate traceability. On average, it increases the rate of completely covered features in manual documentation from 61.2% to 71.1%, improves file-level traceability recall from 29.9% to 53.0%, and generates documentation that is more conceptually consistent, easier to understand, and better formatted than that produced by existing approaches.
title RepoSummary: Feature-Oriented Summarization and Documentation Generation for Code Repositories
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11039