论文标题

流行GitHub项目产品功能文档策略的探索性研究

An Exploratory Study of Documentation Strategies for Product Features in Popular GitHub Projects

论文作者

Puhlfürß, Tim, Montgomery, Lloyd, Maalej, Walid

论文摘要

[背景]在大型开源软件项目中,开发知识通常在多个人工制品和贡献者中分散,以使各个利益相关者通常不知道产品功能的全部广度。但是,用户想知道该软件的能力,而贡献者需要知道在哪里进行修复,更新和添加功能。 [目的]这项工作旨在了解GitHub项目中如何记录特征知识以及如何将其链接到源代码(如果有的话)。 [方法]我们对25个流行的GitHub存储库进行了深入的定性探索内容分析,该库提供了GitHub社区标准指标推荐的文档伪像。我们首先提取了用于在文本人工制品中记录软件功能的策略,然后用来将功能文档与源代码联系起来的策略。 [结果]我们在所有研究的项目中观察了功能文档,例如READMES,WIKIS和网站资源文件。但是,这些功能通常以非结构化的方式描述。此外,很少使用用于连接功能文档和源代码的跟踪技术。 [结论]我们的结果表明,开源项目中缺乏(或低位)的功能文档,很少使用归一化结构以及罕见的明确参考来源代码。结果,产品功能可追溯性可能非常有限,并且随着时间的推移可维护性。

[Background] In large open-source software projects, development knowledge is often fragmented across multiple artefacts and contributors such that individual stakeholders are generally unaware of the full breadth of the product features. However, users want to know what the software is capable of, while contributors need to know where to fix, update, and add features. [Objective] This work aims at understanding how feature knowledge is documented in GitHub projects and how it is linked (if at all) to the source code. [Method] We conducted an in-depth qualitative exploratory content analysis of 25 popular GitHub repositories that provided the documentation artefacts recommended by GitHub's Community Standards indicator. We first extracted strategies used to document software features in textual artefacts and then strategies used to link the feature documentation with source code. [Results] We observed feature documentation in all studied projects in artefacts such as READMEs, wikis, and website resource files. However, the features were often described in an unstructured way. Additionally, tracing techniques to connect feature documentation and source code were rarely used. [Conclusions] Our results suggest a lacking (or a low-prioritised) feature documentation in open-source projects, little use of normalised structures, and a rare explicit referencing to source code. As a result, product feature traceability is likely to be very limited, and maintainability to suffer over time.

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