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arxiv 2111.08684 v2 pith:N2D3F5RW submitted 2021-11-16 cs.HC cs.SE

Understanding How Programmers Can Use Annotations on Documentation

classification cs.HC cs.SE
keywords annotationsdevelopersdocumentationableannotationauthorfoundinformation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Modern software development requires developers to find and effectively utilize new APIs and their documentation, but documentation has many well-known issues. Despite this, developers eventually overcome these issues but have no way of sharing what they learned. We investigate sharing this documentation-specific information through \textit{annotations}, which have advantages over developer forums as the information is contextualized, not disruptive, and is short, thus easy to author. Developers can also author annotations to support their own comprehension. In order to support the documentation usage behaviors we found, we built the Adamite annotation tool, which supports features such as multi-anchoring, annotation types, and pinning. In our user study, we found that developers are able to create annotations that are useful to themselves and are able to utilize annotations created by other developers when learning a new API, with readers of the annotations completing 67% more of the task, on average, than the baseline.

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