Information correspondence between types of documentation for APIs

Abstract

Documentation for programming languages and their APIs takes many forms, such as reference documentation, blog posts or other textual and visual media. Prior research has suggested that developers switch between reference and tutorial-like documentation while learning a new API. Documentation creation and maintenance is also an effort-intensive process that requires its creators to carefully inspect and organize information, while ensuring consistency across different sources. This article reports on the relationship between information in tutorials and in API reference documentation of three libraries on the topics: regular expressions, unified resource location and Input/Output in the two programming languages, Java and Python. Our investigation reveals that about half of the sentences in the tutorials studied describe API Information, i.e. syntax, behaviour, usage and performance of the API, that could be found in the reference documentation. The remaining are tutorial specific use-cases and examples. We also elicited and analyzed six types of correspondences between sentences in tutorials and reference documentation, ranging from identical to implied. Based on our findings, we propose a general information reuse pattern as a structured abstraction to represent the systematic integration of information from the reference documentation into a tutorial. We report on the distribution of 38 instances of this pattern, and on the impact of applying the pattern automatically on the existing tutorials. This work lays a foundation for understanding the nature of information correspondence across different documentation types to inform and assist documentation generation and maintenance.