Software Documentation Issues Unveiled.

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Bibliographic Details
Title:	Software Documentation Issues Unveiled.
Authors:	Aghajani, Emad¹, Nagy, Csaba¹, Vega-Márquez, Olga Lucero², Linares-Vásquez, Mario², Moreno, Laura³, Bavota, Gabriele¹, Lanza, Michele¹
Source:	ICSE: International Conference on Software Engineering. 5/25/2019, p1199-1210. 12p.
Subjects:	Software documentation, Artificial intelligence, Computer science, Software engineering, Computer software development
Abstract:	(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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Database:	Engineering Source

Description
Abstract:	(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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
DOI:	10.1109/ICSE.2019.00122