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 Detecting outdated software documentation

• Main Authors: TAN, Wen Siang, WAGNER, Markus, TREUDE, Christoph
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: code elements; outdated documentation; outdated references; software repositories; workflow automation; Software Engineering
• 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
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community.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 In our previous work, we proposed an approach to automatically detect outdated code element references in software repositories and found that more than a quarter of the 1000 most popular projects on GitHub contained at least one outdated reference.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Actions tool that builds on our previous work’s approach that GitHub developers can configure to automatically scan for outdated code element references in their GitHub project’s documentation whenever a pull request is submitted.