Blogs (1) >>
ICSE 2019
Sat 25 - Fri 31 May 2019 Montreal, QC, Canada
Fri 31 May 2019 17:00 - 17:10 at Centre-Ville - Software Documentation Chair(s): Bonita Sharif

README files play an essential role in shaping a developer’s 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.

Fri 31 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

16:00 - 17:20
Software DocumentationTechnical Track / Papers / Software Engineering in Practice / Journal-First Papers at Centre-Ville
Chair(s): Bonita Sharif University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
16:00
20m
Talk
Web Feature Deprecation: A Case Study for ChromeSEIPIndustry Program
Software Engineering in Practice
Ariana Mirian University of California San Diego, Nikunj Bhagat Google, Caitlin Sadowski , Adriana Porter Felt Google, Stefan Savage University of California San Diego, Geoffrey M. Voelker University of California San Diego
16:20
20m
Talk
Software Documentation Issues UnveiledTechnical TrackIndustry Program
Technical Track
Emad Aghajani Software Institute, USI - Lugano, Switzerland, Csaba Nagy Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Olga Lucero Vega-Marquez Universidad de los Andes, Universidad de los Llanos, Mario Linares-Vásquez Systems and Computing Engineering Department , Universidad de los Andes , Bogotá, Colombia , Laura Moreno Colorado State University, Gabriele Bavota Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Michele Lanza Universita della Svizzera italiana (USI)
Pre-print
16:40
20m
Talk
9.6 Million Links in Source Code Comments: Purpose, Evolution, and DecayArtifacts AvailableTechnical Track
Technical Track
Hideaki Hata Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Christoph Treude The University of Adelaide, Raula Gaikovina Kula NAIST, Takashi Ishio Nara Institute of Science and Technology
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
17:00
10m
Talk
Categorizing the Content of GitHub README FilesJournal-First
Journal-First Papers
Gede Artha Azriadi Prana Singapore Management University, Christoph Treude The University of Adelaide, Ferdian Thung , Thushari Atapattu The University of Adelaide, David Lo Singapore Management University
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
17:10
10m
Talk
Discussion Period
Papers