Leveraging Informal Documentation to Summarize Classes and Methods in Context

Critical information related to a software developer's current task is trapped in technical developer discussions, bug reports, code reviews, and other software artefacts. Much of this information pertains to the proper use of code elements (e.g., methods and classes) that capture vital problem domain knowledge. To understand the purpose of these code elements, software developers must either access documentation and online posts and understand the source code or peruse a substantial amount of text. In this paper, we use the context that surrounds code elements in StackOverflow posts to summarize the use and purpose of code elements. To provide focus to our investigation, we consider the generation of summaries for library identifiers discussed in StackOverflow. Our automatic summarization approach was evaluated on a sample of 100 randomly-selected library identifiers with respect to a benchmark of summaries provided by two annotators. The results show that the approach attains an R-precision of 54%, which is appropriate given the diverse ways in which code elements can be used.