1. DEFICIENT DOCUMENTATION DETECTION
A Methodology to Locate Deficient Project
Documentation using Topic Analysis
Joshua Charles Campbell Department of Computing Science
Chenlei Zhang Department of Computing Science
Zhen Xu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Abram Hindle Department of Computing Science
James Miller Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

2. MOTIVATION
Developers
Official
Crowd-sourced
MSR 2013 2
Project
Documentation
Q&A Website

3. RESEARCH QUESTION
• Answer the question “Can we identify deficient
areas of project documentation by relating it to
Stack Overflow questions?”
• Provide a method to relate crowd-sourced
questions and project documentation.
3MSR 2013

4. METHODOLOGY
4
Stack
Overflow
Questions
Data
Extraction
Project
Documentation
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Two-phase Processing
• Data extraction
• Topic analysis
LDA
Ranked Deficient
Topics
Topic
Analysis
Stack Overflow
Question/Topic
Matrix
Project
Documentation/Topic
Matrix
Max
Subtract

5. DEFICIENT TOPICS FOUND
5MSR 2013

6. PHP EXAMPLE
6
• Deficient documentation exists
• Stack Overflow question #7321289:
• “How want to apply a vignette effect to an image using PHP with
ImageMagik. I found this function but I’m not sure how to use it.”
• PHP documentation:
• Imagick::vignetteImage
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/imagick.vignetteimage.php
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7. PYTHON EXAMPLE
7
• Deficient documentation exists
• Stack Overflow question #5893163:
• “What is the meaning of _ after for in this code?”
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8. OUT-OF-SCOPE DOCUMENTATION
• Questions that related to multiple projects
• For example, questions about:
• Clear indications and links should be included
when a user should reference external project
documentation
8
HTML
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MySQL

9. CONCLUSION
• Developed a method for locating deficient
documented aspects in project documentation;
• Successfully located deficient project
documentation using Stack Overflow questions.
9MSR 2013