Jadeite: improving API documentation using usage information

  • Authors:

  • Jeffrey Stylos;Brad A. Myers;Zizhuang Yang

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Jadeite is a new Javadoc-like API documentation system that takes advantage of multiple users' aggregate experience to reduce difficulties that programmers have learning new APIs. Previous studies have shown that programmers often guessed that certain classes or methods should exist, and looked for these in the API. Jadeite's "placeholders" let users add new "pretend" classes or methods that are displayed in the actual API documentation, and can be annotated with the appropriate APIs to use instead. Since studies showed that programmers had difficulty finding the right classes from long lists in documentation, Jadeite takes advantage of usage statistics to display commonly used classes more prominently. Programmers had difficulty finding the right helper objects and discovering how to instantiate objects, so Jadeite uses a large corpus of sample code to automatically identify the most common ways to construct an instance of any given class.