ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DEVELOPER LEARNING RESOURCES by

Developer documentation helps developers learn frameworks and libraries, yet developing and maintaining accurate documentation require considerable effort and resources. Contributors who work on developer documentation need to at least take into account the project’s code and the support needs of users. Although related, the documentation, the code, and the support needs evolve and are not always synchronized: for example, new features in the code are not always documented and questions repeatedly asked by users on support channels such as mailing lists may not be addressed by the documentation. Our thesis is that by studying how the relationships between documentation, code, and users ’ support needs are created and maintained, we can identify documentation improvements and automatically recommend some of these improvements to contributors. In this dissertation, we (1) studied the perspective of documentation contributors by interviewing open source contributors and users, (2) developed a technique that automatically generates the model of documentation, code, and users ’ support needs, (3) devised a technique that recover

Recommending adaptive changes for framework evolution

Application frameworks provide a general design that connects together the different parts of a program and that free developers from low-value activities. In the course of a framework's evolution, changes ranging from a simple function renaming to major modifications of the design can break client programs that depend on the framework. Finding suitable replacements for framework elements that were accessed by a client program and deleted as part of the framework's evolution can be a challenging task. We present a recommendation system, SemDiff, that suggests adaptations to client programs by analyzing how a framework was adapted to its own changes. In a study of the evolution of a large open-source framework and three client programs, our approach recommended relevant adaptive changes with a high level of precision, and detected non-trivial changes typically undiscovered by current changes detection techniques.Les cadres d'applications fournissent un design général qui relie les différentes parties d'un programme et qui libère les développeurs des tâches à faible valeur ajoutée. Durant l'évolution d'un cadre d'applications, des changements allant d'un simple renommage d'une fonction à des modifications majeures du design peuvent briser les programmes clients qui dépendent du cadre d'applications. Trouver un remplacement adéquat pour les éléments du cadre d'applications qui étaient accédés par le programme client et qui ont été supprimés durant l'évolution du cadre d'applications peut s'avérer être une tâche difficile. Nous présentons un système de recommandations, SemDiff, qui suggère des adaptations aux programmes clients en analysant comment un cadre d'applications a été adapté à ses propres modifications. Dans une étude sur l'évolution d'un grand cadre d'applications en code source libre et de trois programmes clients, notre système a recommandé des adaptations pertinentes avec un haut degré de précision. Notre système a aussi détecté des changements non triviaux qui sont typiquement ignorés par les techniques de détection de changements courantes

Aiding evolution with concern-oriented guides

Program documentation is often incomplete and out of date due to its tediousness and perceived low value. This requires evolution tasks to be preceded by time-consuming exploration. In this paper, we explore a concern-oriented approach to documentation that focuses on the code artifacts and their relationships to make the process of creating and using program documentation more efficient. As opposed to traditional documents or tutorials, guides created using this approach are interactive, almost wordless and automatically maintain implementation examples. We also present the rationale and the architecture of Mismar, a toolset tightly integrated in the Eclipse environment and implementing this approach. Moreover, since program documentation involves different artifact types, Mismar was build from the ground up to be extensible, and to support artifacts written in multiple languages or modeling approaches