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ESEC/FSE 2021
Thu 19 - Sat 28 August 2021 Clowdr Platform

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 Aug

Displayed time zone: Athens change

17:00 - 18:00
Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2Research Papers / Journal First +12h
Chair(s): Santanu Dash University of Surrey, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila
17:00
10m
Paper
A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Java Library Migrations: Prevalence, Trends, and RationalesArtifacts AvailableArtifacts Reusable
Research Papers
Hao He Peking University, Runzhi He Peking University, Haiqiao Gu Tsinghua University, Minghui Zhou Peking University
DOI Pre-print
17:10
10m
Paper
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
10m
Paper
Information Correspondence between Types of Documentation for APIs
Journal First
Deeksha M. Arya McGill University, Jin L.C. Guo McGill University, Martin P. Robillard McGill University
17:30
30m
Live Q&A
Q&A (Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2)
Research Papers

Thu 26 Aug

Displayed 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
10m
Paper
A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Java Library Migrations: Prevalence, Trends, and RationalesArtifacts AvailableArtifacts Reusable
Research Papers
Hao He Peking University, Runzhi He Peking University, Haiqiao Gu Tsinghua University, Minghui Zhou Peking University
DOI Pre-print
05:10
10m
Paper
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
10m
Paper
Information Correspondence between Types of Documentation for APIs
Journal First
Deeksha M. Arya McGill University, Jin L.C. Guo McGill University, Martin P. Robillard McGill University
05:30
30m
Live Q&A
Q&A (Analytics & Software Evolution—Libraries and APIs 2)
Research Papers