Bimodal software documentation

Abstract 

Software developers have access to many documentation channels, ranging from formal API specifications to informal exchanges on the question-and-answer forum Stack Overflow. Yet, finding the right piece of natural language or source code in these channels can be challenging. To support developers in navigating the available information, in our previous work, we have explored indexing documentation using task phrases as well as using summarization techniques to bring information from different channels together. A unique characteristic of software documentation is the tight integration of natural language and source code. While this poses challenges to the automated analysis of the information in these channels, it also creates opportunities for new software engineering tools, for example to facilitate code reuse. In this talk, we summarize our previous and ongoing work on improving software developers' access to the knowledge that is captured in software documentation in the form of natural language and source code.

Bio

Christoph Treude is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada, in 2012 and received his Diplom degree in Computer Science / Management Information Systems from the University of Siegen, Germany, in 2007. The goal of his research is to advance collaborative software engineering through empirical studies and the innovation of processes and tools that explicitly take the wide variety of artifacts available in a software repository into account.