Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2011

Abstract

Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API — jQuery — are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9% of the API methods, mainly featuring tutorials and personal experiences about using the methods. Further, this effort is shared by a large group of developers contributing just a few blog posts. Our findings indicate that social media is more than a niche in software documentation, that it can provide high levels of coverage and that it gives readers a chance to engage with authors.

Keywords

api documentation, social media, crowd documentation

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Web2SE '11: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering, Honolulu, United States, May 24

First Page

25

Last Page

30

ISBN

9781450305952

Identifier

10.1145/1984701.1984706

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/1984701.1984706

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