Divinator: A Visual Studio Code Extension to Source Code Summarization

Software developers spend a substantial amount of time reading and understanding code. Research has shown that code comprehension tasks can be expedited by reading the available documentation. However, documentation is expensive to generate and maintain, so the available documentation is often missing or outdated. Thus, automated generation of brief natural language descriptions for source code is desirable and has the potential to play a key role in source code comprehension and development. In particular, recent advances in deep learning have led to sophisticated summary generation techniques. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no study has fully integrated a state-of-the-art code summarization technique into an integrated development environment (IDE). In hopes of filling this gap, we developed a VS Code extension that allows developers to take advantage of state-of-the-art code summarization from within the IDE. This paper describes Divinator, our IDE-integrated tool for source code summarization.