No Arabic abstract
Automatic documentation generation tools, or auto docs, are widely used to visualize information about APIs. However, each auto doc tool comes with its own unique representation of API information. In this paper, I use an information visualization analysis of auto docs to generate potential design principles for improving their usability. Developers use auto docs as a reference by looking up relevant API primitives given partial information, or leads, about its name, type, or behavior. I discuss how auto docs can better support searching and scanning on these leads, e.g. by providing more information-dense visualizations of method signatures.
Effort estimation is an integral part of activities planning in Agile iterative development. An Agile team estimates the effort of a task based on the available information which is usually conveyed through documentation. However, as documentation has a lower priority in Agile, little is known about how documentation effort can be optimized while achieving accurate estimation. Hence, to help practitioners achieve just-enough documentation for effort estimation, we investigated the different types of documented information that practitioners considered useful for effort estimation. We conducted a survey study with 121 Agile practitioners across 25 countries. Our survey results showed that (1) despite the lower priority of documentation in Agile practices, 98% of the respondents considered documented information moderately to extremely important when estimating effort, (2) 73% of them reported that they would re-estimate a task when the documented information was changed, and (3) functional requirements, user stories, definition of done, UI wireframes, acceptance criteria, and task dependencies were ranked as the most useful types of documented information for effort estimation. Nevertheless, many respondents reported that these useful types of documented information were occasionally changing or missing. Based on our study results, we provide recommendations for agile practitioners on how effort estimation can be improved by focusing on just-enough documentation.
Jupyter notebook allows data scientists to write machine learning code together with its documentation in cells. In this paper, we propose a new task of code documentation generation (CDG) for computational notebooks. In contrast to the previous CDG tasks which focus on generating documentation for single code snippets, in a computational notebook, one documentation in a markdown cell often corresponds to multiple code cells, and these code cells have an inherent structure. We proposed a new model (HAConvGNN) that uses a hierarchical attention mechanism to consider the relevant code cells and the relevant code tokens information when generating the documentation. Tested on a new corpus constructed from well-documented Kaggle notebooks, we show that our model outperforms other baseline models.
Various software features such as classes, methods, requirements, and tests often have similar functionality. This can lead to emergence of duplicates in their descriptive documentation. Uncontrolled duplicates created via copy/paste hinder the process of documentation maintenance. Therefore, the task of duplicate detection in software documentation is of importance. Solving it makes planned reuse possible, as well as creating and using templates for unification and automatic generation of documentation. In this paper, we present an interactive process for duplicate detection that involves the user in order to conduct meaningful search. It includes a new formal definition of a near duplicate, a pattern-based, and the proof of its completeness. Moreover, we demonstrate the results of experimenting on a collection of documents of several industrial projects.
Web API specifications are machine-readable descriptions of APIs. These specifications, in combination with related tooling, simplify and support the consumption of APIs. However, despite the increased distribution of web APIs, specifications are rare and their creation and maintenance heavily relies on manual efforts by third parties. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach and an associated tool called D2Spec for extracting specifications from web API documentation pages. Given a seed online documentation page on an API, D2Spec first crawls all documentation pages on the API, and then uses a set of machine learning techniques to extract the base URL, path templates, and HTTP methods, which collectively describe the endpoints of an API. We evaluated whether D2Spec can accurately extract endpoints from documentation on 120 web APIs. The results showed that D2Spec achieved a precision of 87.5% in identifying base URLs, a precision of 81.3% and a recall of 80.6% in generating path templates, and a precision of 84.4% and a recall of 76.2% in extracting HTTP methods. In addition, we found that D2Spec was useful when applied to APIs with pre-existing API specifications: D2Spec revealed many inconsistencies between web API documentation and their corresponding publicly available specifications. Thus, D2Spec can be used by web API providers to keep documentation and specifications in synchronization.
It is integral to test API functions of widely used deep learning (DL) libraries. The effectiveness of such testing requires DL specific input constraints of these API functions. Such constraints enable the generation of valid inputs, i.e., inputs that follow these DL specific constraints, to explore deep to test the core functionality of API functions. Existing fuzzers have no knowledge of such constraints, and existing constraint extraction techniques are ineffective for extracting DL specific input constraints. To fill this gap, we design and implement a document guided fuzzing technique, D2C, for API functions of DL libraries. D2C leverages sequential pattern mining to generate rules for extracting DL specific constraints from API documents and uses these constraints to guide the fuzzing to generate valid inputs automatically. D2C also generates inputs that violate these constraints to test the input validity checking code. In addition, D2C uses the constraints to generate boundary inputs to detect more bugs. Our evaluation of three popular DL libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet) shows that D2Cs accuracy in extracting input constraints is 83.3% to 90.0%. D2C detects 121 bugs, while a baseline fuzzer without input constraints detects only 68 bugs. Most (89) of the 121 bugs are previously unknown, 54 of which have been fixed or confirmed by developers after we report them. In addition, D2C detects 38 inconsistencies within documents, including 28 that are fixed or confirmed after we report them.