Journal
2019 IEEE/ACM 41ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (ICSE 2019)
Volume -, Issue -, Pages 1199-1210Publisher
IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/ICSE.2019.00122
Keywords
Documentation; Empirical Study
Categories
Funding
- Swiss National Science Foundation [172799, 175513]
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(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.
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