Automated API Documentation with Tutorials Generated From Stack Overflow

Abstract

Software reuse provides benefits during the software development and maintenance processes. The use of APIs is one of the most common ways to reuse. However, obtaining an easy-to-understand documentation is a challenge faced by developers. Several papers have proposed alternatives to make API documentation more understandable, or even more detailed. However, these studies have not taken into account the complexity of examples in order to make documentation adaptable to different levels of developer experience. In this work, we developed and evaluated four different methodologies to generate tutorials for APIs from the contents of Stack Overflow and organize them according to the complexity of understanding. The methodologies were evaluated through tutorials generated for the Swing API. A survey was conducted to evaluate eight different features of the generated tutorials. The overall outcome was positive on several characteristics, showing the feasibility of automatically generated tutorials. In addition, the adoption of features for presenting tutorial elements in order of complexity, for separating the tutorial in basic and advanced parts, for selecting posts with a tutorial nature and with didactic source code had significantly better results regarding the generation methodology.