Crowd cookbooks: usando conhecimento de multidão a partir de sítios de perguntas e respostas para documentação de apis

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Souza, Lucas Batista Leite de
• Orientador(a): Maia, Marcelo de Almeida
• Banca de defesa: Macêdo, Autran , Valente, Marco Túlio de Oliveira
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Uberlândia
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação
• Departamento: Ciências Exatas e da Terra
• País: BR
• Palavras-chave em Português: Sítios de perguntas e respostas; Conhecimento da multidão; Interface para programação de aplicativos; Documentação de software; Crowdsourcing; Interfaces de programação de aplicativo (software de computador)
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Questions and answers sites; Crowd knowledge; Application programming interface, Software documentation
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CNPQ::CIENCIAS EXATAS E DA TERRA::CIENCIA DA COMPUTACAO
• Link de acesso: https://repositorio.ufu.br/handle/123456789/12567; https://doi.org/10.14393/ufu.di.2014.351

Developers of reusable software elements, such as libraries, usually have the responsibility to provide comprehensive and high quality documentation to enable eective reuse of those elements. The eective reuse of libraries depends upon the quality of the API (Application Program Interface) documentation. Well established libraries typically have comprehensive API documentation, for example in Javadocs. However, they also typically lack examples and explanations, which may dicult the eective reuse of the library. StackOverow.com (SO) is a Question and Answer service directed to issues related to software development. In SO, a developer can post questions related to a programming topic and other members of the site can provide answers to help him/her solve the problem he/she has at hand. Despite of the increasing use of SO by the software development community, the information related to a particular library is spread along the website. Thus, SO still lacks an organization of its crowd knowledge. In this dissertation, we present a semi-automatic approach that organizes the information available on SO in order to build a kind of documentation for APIs, called cookbooks (recipe-oriented books). The cookbooks generated by the approach are called crowd cookbooks. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, cookbooks were generated for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT,LINQ and QT. Desired features that cookbooks must meet were identied and a study with human subjects was conducted to assess to what extent the generated cookbook meet those features. Through the study it was also possible to identify what is the perceived usefulness by the subjects in relation to the use of cookbooks in APIs learning. The results showed that the cookbooks built using the proposed strategy, in general, meet the identied features. Furthermore, most human subjects considered that cookbooks do not have an appropriate format to the learning of APIs.