Enforcing Constraints Between Documentary Comments and Source Code

An approach for enforcing constraints between program entities and their documentary comments is presented. The approach uses srcML to represent Java source code and introduces an XML format, namely srcDoc, for marking up Javadoc-style comments. The enforced constraints are specified with a combination of XML and XQuery. An Eclipse plugin is described that demonstrates the use of XML and related technologies to express and enforce constraints on documentary comments. Examples of constraints enforcing design rationale for methods in an API are shown.