Creating and evolving developer documentation: understanding the decisions of open source contributors
Abstract
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.
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Core developers are more stable participants who remain involved throughout the project lifecycle and possess deep familiarity of the project's architecture, conventions, and evolution.
“core developers are more stable participants who remain involved throughout the project lifecycle and possess deep familiarity of the project's architecture, conventions, and evolution (Dagenais and Robillard 2010).”
From The Impact of Generative AI on Collaborative Open-Source Software Development: Evidence from GitHub Copilot  (2024) · cites this paper as Dagenais and Robillard 2010
Cites
Basics of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.): Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory
Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008) · SAGE · doi:10.4135/9781452230153 · Cited by 12,136 · see citing works
The relevance of software documentation, tools and technologies: a survey
Forward, A., & Lethbridge, T. C. (2002) · Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Document engineering · doi:10.1145/585058.585065 · Cited by 268 · see citing works
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On the Comprehension of Program Comprehension
Maalej, W., Tiarks, R., Roehm, T., & Koschke, R. (2014) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/2622669 · Cited by 180 · see citing works
An Information Foraging Theory Perspective on Tools for Debugging, Refactoring, and Reuse Tasks
Fleming, S. D., Scaffidi, C., Piorkowski, D., Burnett, M., Bellamy, R., Lawrance, J., & Kwan, I. (2013) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/2430545.2430551 · Cited by 79 · see citing works
Application Programming Interface Documentation: What Do Software Developers Want?
Meng, M., Steinhardt, S., & Schubert, A. (2018) · Journal of Technical Writing and Communication · doi:10.1177/0047281617721853 · Cited by 78 · see citing works
Enabling Data-Driven API Design with Community Usage Data: A Need-Finding Study
Zhang, T., Hartmann, B., Kim, M., & Glassman, E. L. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3313831.3376382 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Dagenais, B., & Robillard, M. P.
- Affiliations
- McGill University (CA)
- ORCID
- Robillard, Martin P.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2010-11-07
- Pages
- 127-136
- OpenAlex
- W2166271660
- Cited by
- 124
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 11 · 2012: 14
- FWCI
- 6.72
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Keywords
- developer documentation, open source projects, documentation maintenance, developer experience, code quality, document revision
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