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Leveraging Crowd-sourced Information to Guide Library Usage
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- Author / Creator
- Noori, Benyamin
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Studies have shown that there is a mismatch between the information needs of a developer and information provided by the documentation of software libraries. Additionally, previous work suggests that developers' information needs are driven by the tasks they do. Based on these previous findings, we argue library documentation should be task-oriented. We propose a technique to generate task-oriented library documentation based on information extracted from the popular crowd-sourced Q & A website, Stack Overflow. Our methodology makes use of natural language processing techniques as well domain-specific heuristics to process and organize information available on Stack Overflow. The resulting task-oriented documentation for a software library contains three main components: (1) a list of tasks that can be achieved using the library, (2) a set of code snippets to demonstrate how to accomplish a specific task, and (3) additional information about trade-offs and insights of using specific Application Programming Interfaces.
To evaluate the quality of information we extract and the usefulness of our approach, we conduct a survey of a diverse group of 69 Java developers. In addition to showing that our proposed task-oriented library documentation is useful to developers, the findings of our online survey also shed light on current limitations and challenges of extracting information from crowd-sourced websites. Finally, we present improvements to parts of our methodology, based on our analysis of the results.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2018
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.