Wait, wasn't that code here before? Detecting outdated software documentation

Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community. To ensure that software documentation is up-to-date, developers often have to manually check whether the documentation needs to be updated whenever changes are made to the sou...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: TAN, Wen Siang, WAGNER, Markus, TREUDE, Christoph
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8838
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9841/viewcontent/278300a553.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community. To ensure that software documentation is up-to-date, developers often have to manually check whether the documentation needs to be updated whenever changes are made to the source code. In our previous work, we proposed an approach to automatically detect outdated code element references in software repositories and found that more than a quarter of the 1000 most popular projects on GitHub contained at least one outdated reference. In this paper, we present a GitHub Actions tool that builds on our previous work’s approach that GitHub developers can configure to automatically scan for outdated code element references in their GitHub project’s documentation whenever a pull request is submitted.