TaskNav: Task-based navigation of software documentation

• Main Authors: TREUDE, Christoph, SICARD, Mathieu, KLOCKE, Marc, ROBILLARD, Martin P.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Auto-Complete; Development Tasks; Natural Language Processing; Navigation; Software Documentation; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8914; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9917/viewcontent/icse15.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

To help developers navigate documentation, we introduce Task Nav, a tool that automatically discovers and indexes task descriptions in software documentation. With Task Nav, we conceptualize tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. Task Nav presents these extracted task descriptions along with concepts, code elements, and section headers in an auto-complete search interface. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that search results identified through extracted task descriptions are more helpful to developers than those found through other means, and that they help bridge the gap between documentation structure and the information needs of software developers. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opnGYmMGnqY.