Creating and evolving developer documentation: understanding the decisions of open source contributors

Developer documentation helps developers learn frameworks and libraries. To better understand how documentation in open source projects is created and maintained, we performed a qualitative study in which we interviewed core contributors who wrote developer documentation and developers who read documentation. In addition, we studied the evolution of 19 documents by analyzing more than 1500 document revisions. We identified the decisions that contributors make, the factors influencing these decisions and the consequences for the project. Among many findings, we observed how working on the documentation could improve the code quality and how constant interaction with the projects' community positively impacted the documentation. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.7 [Software Engineering]: Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement General Terms Documentation, Experimentation, Human Factors

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Barthélémy Dagenais, Martin P. Robillard
• Keywords: Developer Documentation, Documentation, General Terms Documentation, SIGSOFT 2010, Software Engineering