The document discusses overthrowing alphabetical ordering in documentation systems. It proposes augmenting documentation browsers and JavaDoc to reorder elements based on usage frequency analysis of code corpora to improve developer efficiency. This is achieved through a crawler that gathers data on method usage from Java and Smalltalk codebases and uses the data to dynamically reorder documentation elements. Challenges for dynamically typed languages are also discussed.

1. Overthrowing the Tyranny of Alphabetical
Ordering in Documentation Systems
Boris Spasojevic, Mircea Lungu, Oscar Nierstrasz!
Software Composition Group, University of Bern
1

2. “Alphabetical ordering
must (mostly) die.”
–Jakob Nielsen
2

3. 3

4. 4
The Refactoring Browser

5. 5

6. 6

7. once in every ten years ten times every hour (?)
7

8. We wanted to reclaim !
the time wasted in
browsing through
alphabetically sorted
methods…
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs14/f/2007/074/5/6/The_tick_tock_man_by_Phostex.jpg 8

9. If we knew what methods
developers are looking for, we
could improve the documentation
accordingly.
9

10. Usage of java.lang.Thread in !
Qualitas Corpus
https://github.com/caracciolo/pangea/blob/master/demo/thread-stats.st
10
Pangea streamlines studies!
on multi-language corpora.
Introduced in !
our SCAM 2014 paper.

11. people fear
change
http://www.qvidian.com/sites/default/files/Resist-Change_0.jpg 11

12. The Augmenting Refactoring Browser
http://scg.unibe.ch/research/freq
12

13. Augmenting JavaDoc in Chrome
https://github.com/cederigo/jatis
13

14. 14
Java
Crawler
Smalltalk
Crawler
Data
Gathering
Module
Database
REST API

15. 15
def importance(word, frequency_list):
if word in frequency_list:
position = frequency_list.index(word)
return position
else:
Dynamically typed languages
pose extra challenges
Smalltalk
Crawler
Mining the Ecosystem to Improve Type Inference For Dynamically Typed Languages.
Boris Spasojević, Mircea Lungu, and Oscar Nierstrasz. In Onward! ’14, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2014.

16. As a warrant that the
approach works, we
provide our own testimonials.
(For now.)
!
We are still working on…!
- Extending to classes /
Packages
- Improving the type
inference for ST
- Alternative orderings
http://scg.unibe.ch/research/freq
https://github.com/cederigo/jatis
More details !
in the paper