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On the Rise of Modern Software Documentation (Pearl/Brave New Idea)

Authors Marco Raglianti , Csaba Nagy , Roberto Minelli , Bin Lin , Michele Lanza

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Author Details

Marco Raglianti
  • REVEAL @ Software Institute — USI, Lugano, Switzerland
Csaba Nagy
  • REVEAL @ Software Institute — USI, Lugano, Switzerland
Roberto Minelli
  • REVEAL @ Software Institute — USI, Lugano, Switzerland
Bin Lin
  • Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Michele Lanza
  • REVEAL @ Software Institute — USI, Lugano, Switzerland

Funding

This work is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through the project "INSTINCT" (SNF Project No. 190113).

Acknowledgements

Marco Raglianti would also like to thank the Swiss Group for Original and Outside-the-box Software Engineering (CHOOSE) for sponsoring the trip to the conference.

Cite As Get BibTex

Marco Raglianti, Csaba Nagy, Roberto Minelli, Bin Lin, and Michele Lanza. On the Rise of Modern Software Documentation (Pearl/Brave New Idea). In 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 263, pp. 43:1-43:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.43

Abstract

Classical software documentation, as it was conceived and intended decades ago, is not the only reality anymore. Official documentation from authoritative and official sources is being replaced by real-time collaborative platforms and ecosystems that have seen a surge, influenced by changes in society, technology, and best practices. These modern tools influence the way developers document the conception, design, and implementation of software. As a by-product of these shifts, developers are changing their way of communicating about software. Where once official documentation stood as the only truth about a project, we now find a multitude of volatile and heterogeneous documentation sources, forming a complex and ever-changing documentation landscape. 
Software projects often include a top-level README file with important information, which we leverage to identify their documentation landscape. Starting from ∼12K GitHub repositories, we mine their README files to extract links to additional documentation sources. We present a qualitative analysis, revealing multiple dimensions of the documentation landscape (e.g., content type, source type), highlighting important insights. By analyzing instant messaging application links (e.g., Gitter, Slack, Discord) in the histories of README files, we show how this part of the landscape has grown and evolved in the last decade.
Our findings show that modern documentation encompasses communication platforms, which are exploding in popularity. This is not a passing phenomenon: On the contrary, it entails a number of unknowns and socio-technical problems the research community is currently ill-prepared to tackle.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Collaboration in software development
  • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing
Keywords
  • software documentation landscape
  • GitHub README
  • instant messaging

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