Software documentation issues unveiled
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering(2019)
摘要
(Good) Software documentation provides developers and users with a description of what a software system does, how it operates, and how it should be used. For example, technical documentation (e.g., an API reference guide) aids developers during evolution/maintenance activities, while a user manual explains how users are to interact with a system. Despite its intrinsic value, the creation and the maintenance of documentation is often neglected, negatively impacting its quality and usefulness, ultimately leading to a generally unfavorable take on documentation.
Previous studies investigating documentation issues have been based on surveying developers, which naturally leads to a somewhat biased view of problems affecting documentation. We present a large scale empirical study, where we mined, analyzed, and categorized 878 documentation-related artifacts stemming from four different sources, namely mailing lists, Stack Overflow discussions, issue repositories, and pull requests. The result is a detailed taxonomy of documentation issues from which we infer a series of actionable proposals both for researchers and practitioners.
更多查看译文
关键词
documentation, empirical study
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络