Wait, wasn't that code here before? Detecting Outdated Software Documentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GitHub Actions tool that automatically detects outdated code references in software documentation during pull requests, helping developers maintain up-to-date documentation efficiently.

Contribution

It extends previous research by providing an automated, configurable tool integrated into GitHub workflows to identify outdated documentation references.

Findings

Over a quarter of popular GitHub projects have outdated references

The tool automates detection during pull requests

Enhances documentation accuracy and developer efficiency

Abstract

Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community.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 In our previous work, we proposed an approach to automatically detect outdated code element references in software repositories and found that more than a quarter of the 1000 most popular projects on GitHub contained at least one outdated reference.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tool that builds on our previous work's approach that GitHub developers can configure to automatically scan for outdated code element references in their GitHub project's documentation whenever a pull request is submitted.