Understanding How Programmers Can Use Annotations on Documentation

TL;DR

This paper explores how annotations on documentation can improve API understanding and sharing among developers, introducing a tool and demonstrating its effectiveness through a user study.

Contribution

It presents Adamite, a novel annotation tool supporting multi-anchoring and annotation types, and provides empirical evidence of its benefits in API learning.

Findings

Developers can create useful annotations for themselves.

Annotations help others learn APIs more effectively.

Readers completed 67% more of the task with annotations.

Abstract

Modern software development requires developers to find and effectively utilize new APIs and their documentation, but documentation has many well-known issues. Despite this, developers eventually overcome these issues but have no way of sharing what they learned. We investigate sharing this documentation-specific information through \textit{annotations}, which have advantages over developer forums as the information is contextualized, not disruptive, and is short, thus easy to author. Developers can also author annotations to support their own comprehension. In order to support the documentation usage behaviors we found, we built the Adamite annotation tool, which supports features such as multi-anchoring, annotation types, and pinning. In our user study, we found that developers are able to create annotations that are useful to themselves and are able to utilize annotations created by other developers when learning a new API, with readers of the annotations completing 67% more of the task, on average, than the baseline.