API Usage in Descriptions of Source Code Functionality

Paige Rodeghero works on API documentation, focusing on auto-generating documentation, because developers (also we ;)) tend to neglect documentation, especially when their in a hurry. She used eye tracking to track developers’ attention (assuming that they focus on thing that are most relevant to them) and used this information to generate code summaries. This gave here a large set of method summaries to work with. The goal of here current line of work is to see how developers at different experience levels can best be supported with documentation.

Paige recently started to work on a study comparing high- and low-level method descriptions. She had 27 students assess a set of method descriptions along this dimension. She use this data to see how the amount of details in a summary correlates with the usage of API keywords in the summaries. She found that low-level descriptions contain more API keywords than high-level descriptions.

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