Information Correspondence between Types of Documentation for APIs
Thu 26 Aug 2021 05:20 - 05:30 - Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2 Chair(s): Julia Rubin
Documentation for programming languages and their APIs takes many forms, such as reference documentation, blog posts or other textual and visual media. Prior research has suggested that developers switch between reference and tutorial-like documentation while learning a new API. Documentation creation and maintenance is also an effort-intensive process that requires its creators to carefully inspect and organize information, while ensuring consistency across different sources. In the Empirical Software Engineering paper “Information Correspondence between Types of Documentation for APIs”, we reported the relationship between information in tutorials and in API reference documentation of three libraries on the topics: regular expressions, unified resource location and Input/Output in the two programming languages Java and Python. Our investigation reveals that about half of the sentences in the tutorials studied describe API Information, i.e. syntax, behaviour, usage and performance of the API, that could be found in the reference documentation. The remaining are tutorial specific use-cases and examples. We also elicited and analyzed six types of correspondences between sentences in tutorials and reference documentation, ranging from identical to implied. Based on our findings, we proposed a general information reuse pattern as a structured abstraction to represent the systematic integration of information from the reference documentation into a tutorial. We reported on the distribution of 38 instances of this pattern, and on the impact of applying the pattern automatically on the existing tutorials. This work lays a foundation for understanding the nature of information correspondence across different documentation types to inform and assist documentation generation and maintenance.
Wed 25 AugDisplayed time zone: Athens change
17:00 - 18:00 | Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2Research Papers / Journal First +12h Chair(s): Santanu Kumar Dash University of Surrey, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila | ||
17:00 10mPaper | A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Java Library Migrations: Prevalence, Trends, and Rationales Research Papers Hao He Peking University, Runzhi He Peking University, Haiqiao Gu Tsinghua University, Minghui Zhou Peking University DOI Pre-print | ||
17:10 10mPaper | Learning-Based Extraction of First-Order Logic Representations of API Directives Research Papers Mingwei Liu Fudan University, Xin Peng Fudan University, Andrian Marcus University of Texas at Dallas, Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Xuefang Bai Fudan University, Gang Lyu Fudan University, Jiazhan Xie Fudan University, Xiaoxin Zhang Fudan University DOI | ||
17:20 10mPaper | Information Correspondence between Types of Documentation for APIs Journal First Deeksha Arya McGill University, Jin L.C. Guo McGill University, Martin P. Robillard McGill University | ||
17:30 30mLive Q&A | Q&A (Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2) Research Papers |
Thu 26 AugDisplayed time zone: Athens change
05:00 - 06:00 | Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2Journal First / Research Papers Chair(s): Julia Rubin University of British Columbia | ||
05:00 10mPaper | A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Java Library Migrations: Prevalence, Trends, and Rationales Research Papers Hao He Peking University, Runzhi He Peking University, Haiqiao Gu Tsinghua University, Minghui Zhou Peking University DOI Pre-print | ||
05:10 10mPaper | Learning-Based Extraction of First-Order Logic Representations of API Directives Research Papers Mingwei Liu Fudan University, Xin Peng Fudan University, Andrian Marcus University of Texas at Dallas, Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Xuefang Bai Fudan University, Gang Lyu Fudan University, Jiazhan Xie Fudan University, Xiaoxin Zhang Fudan University DOI | ||
05:20 10mPaper | Information Correspondence between Types of Documentation for APIs Journal First Deeksha Arya McGill University, Jin L.C. Guo McGill University, Martin P. Robillard McGill University | ||
05:30 30mLive Q&A | Q&A (Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2) Research Papers |