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README files play an essential role in shaping a developers first impression of a software repository and in documenting the software project that the repository hosts. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the content of a typical README file as well as tools that can process these files automatically. To close this gap, we conduct a qualitative study involving the manual annotation of 4,226 README file sections from 393 randomly sampled GitHub repositories and we design and evaluate a classifier and a set of features that can categorize these sections automatically. We find that information discussing the `What and `How of a repository is very common, while many README files lack information regarding the purpose and status of a repository. Our multi-label classifier which can predict eight different categories achieves an F1 score of 0.746. To evaluate the usefulness of the classification, we used the automatically determined classes to label sections in GitHub README files using badges and showed files with and without these badges to twenty software professionals. The majority of participants perceived the automated labeling of sections based on our classifier to ease information discovery. This work enables the owners of software repositories to improve the quality of their documentation and it has the potential to make it easier for the software development community to discover relevant information in GitHub README files.
Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers, frequently worki
Discussions is a new feature of GitHub for asking questions or discussing topics outside of specific Issues or Pull Requests. Before being available to all projects in December 2020, it had been tested on selected open source software projects. To un
Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, espe
When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are amply docum
Context: Open source software development has become more social and collaborative, especially with the rise of social coding platforms like GitHub. Since 2016, GitHub started to support more informal methods such as emoji reactions, with the goal to