Automatically Generating Documentation for Lambda Expressions in Java

When lambda expressions were introduced to the Java programming language as part of the release of Java 8 in 2014, they were the language's first step into functional programming. Since lambda expressions are still relatively new, not all developers use or understand them. In this paper, we first present the results of an empirical study to determine how frequently developers of GitHub repositories make use of lambda expressions and how they are documented. We find that 11% of Java GitHub repositories use lambda expressions, and that only 6% of the lambda expressions are accompanied by source code comments. We then present a tool called LambdaDoc which can automatically detect lambda expressions in a Java repository and generate natural language documentation for them. Our evaluation of LambdaDoc with 23 professional developers shows that they perceive the generated documentation to be complete, concise, and expressive, while the majority of the documentation produced by our participants without tool support was inadequate. Our contribution builds an important step towards automatically generating documentation for functional programming constructs in an object-oriented language.Comment: to appear as full paper at MSR 2019, the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositorie

Generating automatically the documentation from PLC code by D4T3 to improve the usability and life cycle management of software in automation

D4T3 (i.e. Doxygen for TwinCAT3) was developed to generate automatically the documentation from a set of documented and/or undocumented PLC source files. D4T3 documentation was designed to support traditional PLC-world features (e.g. inputs, programs, tasks, etc.) and more recent Object Oriented features of IEC61131-3 (e.g. interfaces, inheritance, etc.). Moreover, this documentation was designed to be generated as an on-line manual (i.e. HTML) and/or as an off-line reference manual (e.g. LATEX, CHM, etc.). The usability, maintainability and understanding of documented PLC software was found significantly improved when the software was provided with its D4T3 documentation. Additionally, D4T3 reduced the time spent on documentation and managed the differences among versions. Thus, the automated documentation generator can be used to simplify/overcome the usability and life-cycle-management challenges in automation. It can also lead PLC vendors to design a common tool to generate the PLC software documentation supporting system engineers and software engineers in automation