Recodoc

Analysis Platform for Developer Learning Resources

News

[March 10th, 2012] Added additional evaluation artifacts.
[September 8th, 2011] Recodoc is now available on GitHub.
   

Overview

Large frameworks and libraries require extensive developer learning resources, such as documentation and mailing lists, to be useful. Maintaining these learning resources is challenging partly because they are not explicitly linked to the frameworks' API, and changes in the API are not reflected in the learning resources. Automatically recovering traceability links between an API and learning resources is notoriously difficult due to the inherent ambiguity of unstructured natural language. Code elements mentioned in documents are rarely fully qualified, so readers need to understand the context in which a code element is mentioned. Recodoc is a platform that:

Documentation

Recodoc's documentation is available on github.

Download

System requirements: Python 2.7, Java 1.6, PostgreSQL or MySQL, and Eclipse 3.6.

To install Recodoc, follow the instructions in the README file and download the source code. We are currently working on an easier installation process.

Recodoc is distributed under the terms of the NEW BSD LICENSE

Publications

Original Paper: Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Recovering Traceability Links between an API and its Learning Resources. To appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2012.

 

Evaluation

We evaluated the accuracy of Recodoc on the learning resources of four open source systems. The detailed results of this evaluation is available in an excel workbook.

The detailed results of our evaluation of documentation patterns is available in an excel workbook.

The detailed results of our evaluation of high-level links between messages and sections is available in an excel workbook.

The detailed results of our evaluation of addition recommendations is available in an excel workbook.

The detailed results of our evaluation of deletion recommendations is available in an excel workbook.

The code and the documentation for all releases we analyzed are also available:

Issues

To fill a bug report or an enhancement request, please use the github issues tracker.

People

Recodoc was created by Barthélémy Dagenais for his PhD thesis while he was supervised by Martin Robillard.

Contact Information

Address questions, and comments to Barthélémy at bart at cs dot mcgill dot ca.