A.2. Field and Method Annotations

The class-level annotations above are part of the public documentation for the class. Other aspects of a class’s thread-safety strategy are entirely for maintainers and are not part of its public documentation.

Classes that use locking should document which state variables are guarded with which locks, and which locks are used to guard those variables. A common source of inadvertent non-thread-safety is when a thread-safe class consistently uses locking to guard its state, but is later modified to add either new state variables that are not adequately guarded by locking, or new methods that do not use locking properly to guard the existing state variables. Documenting which variables are guarded by which locks can help prevent both types of omissions.