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Extracting Development Tasks to Navigate Software Documentation

delete2015-06-01
delete69
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OA
AI
C
Christoph Treude *
M
Martin P. Robillard
B
Barthélémy Dagenais
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2014.2387172delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Knowledge management plays a central role in many software development organizations. While much of the important technical knowledge can be captured in documentation, there often exists a gap between the information needs of software developers and the documentation structure. To help developers navigate documentation, we developed a technique for automatically extracting tasks from software documentation by conceptualizing tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. More than 70 percent of the tasks we extracted from the documentation of two projects were judged meaningful by at least one of two developers. We present TaskNavigator, a user interface for search queries that suggests tasks extracted with our technique in an auto-complete list along with concepts, code elements, and section headers. We conducted a field study in which six professional developers used TaskNavigator for two weeks as part of their ongoing work. We found search results identified through extracted tasks to be more helpful to developers than those found through concepts, code elements, and section headers. The results indicate that task descriptions can be effectively extracted from software documentation, and that they help bridge the gap between documentation structure and the information needs of software developers.
Keywords:
Software documentation
development tasks
navigation
auto-complete
natural language processing
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Journal

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering cover
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IF:
5.6
Papers:
2.8K
Citations:
1.1W

Organization

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte cover
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte
Scholars:
9.7K
Papers: 5.4K
Citations: 5.2K