Automated support for framework documentation

软件开发组织依靠应用程序框架来构建应用程序。框架为重复出现的需求提供了实现的和经过测试的解决方案，并允许组织通过软件基础结构的重用将他们的努力投入到创新的、增值的开发中。大型框架必须有大量的技术文档支持，这些文档可以包括参考手册、教程和代码示例。尽管开发和维护框架文档现在需要大量的投资，但是人们对文档系统对框架可学习性的影响知之甚少，并且很少有自动化来帮助组织管理框架文档。这个研究计划的目标是调查如何使用自动化技术来支持框架文档的开发和维护。在短期内，我们的目标是开发自动化技术：a)分析现有文档和使用数据，提出改进和更新建议；B)基于用户建模技术动态调整文档系统以适应用户需求；C)基于软件版本历史挖掘自动创建教程示例。从长远来看，我们计划以我们对框架文档的理解为基础，扩展研究，以解决框架可用性中的其他相关问题，特别是有效查询框架文档的问题。所有三个目标的研究方法将包括探索性实证研究、算法和原型工具开发，以及使用活跃参与者和存档项目工件的验证研究的结合。建议的工作有可能对组织产生和利用框架文档的方式产生重大影响，并可能帮助组织从手工制作方法转变为由高级软件分析支持的半自动文档创建和管理方法。研究还将涉及对现有软件工件分析技术的广泛重新思考，以解释软件文档的非结构化和教学方面。

Software development organizations rely on application frameworks to build applications. Frameworks provide implemented and tested solutions to recurring requirements, and allow organizations to invest their efforts in innovative, value-adding development through the reuse of software infrastructure. Large frameworks must be supported by extensive technical documentation, which can include reference manuals, tutorials, and code examples. Despite the fact that developing and maintaining framework documentation now requires a major investment, very little is known about the impact of the documentation system on the framework's learnability, and very little automation exists to help organizations manage framework documentation. The goal of this research program is to investigate how automatic techniques can be used to support the development and maintenance of framework documentation. In the short term, we target the development of automated techniques to a) analyze existing documentation and usage data to recommend improvements and updates; b) dynamically adapt documentation systems to users needs based on user modeling techniques; c) automatically create tutorial examples based on software version history mining. For the longer term, we plan to build on our understanding of framework documentation to expand the research to address other pertinent issues in framework usability, and in particular the problem of efficiently querying framework documentation. The research methods for all three objectives will involve a combination of exploratory empirical studies, algorithm and prototype tool development, and validation studies using both active participants and archived project artifacts. The proposed work has the potential to significantly impact how organizations produce and utilize framework documentation and may help organizations shift from a handcrafting approach to a semi-automated documentation creation and management approach supported by advanced software analyses. The research will also involve extensive re-thinking of existing software artifact analysis techniques to account for the unstructured and pedagogical aspects of software documentation.