The recent explosion in software development technologies and the ever-increasing diversity of programmers and programming contexts creates critical challenges for the development of usable and up-to-date software documentation. The concept of traditional, manually-authored documents may be unsustainable in this context. In February 2017, the participants of the DysDoc 2017 Workshop elaborated a vision of On-Demand Developer Documentation (OD3), presented at ICSME 2017. The idea of an OD3 system is to automatically generate high-quality documentation in response to a user query using a combination of knowledge extraction techniques on an underlying collection of structured and unstructured artifacts, including source code, issue tracking system metadata, and posts from Q&A forums.
The DysDoc 2018 workshop will bring together experienced researchers with the goal of developing a strategy for the development of a collaborative software platform to support OD3 research. The workshop will be structured around the development of a specific set of technical and organizational requirements for an open-source OD3 framework, along with a short-term plan for the development of a working prototype.
The workshop will take place at McGill University's Bellairs Research Institute, located directly on a beautiful beach in Barbados. The Bellairs Institute provides basic accommodation (in double occupancy only). The workshop activities will be held directly at the institute.
The workshop is organized by Martin Robillard with Andrian Marcus and Christoph Treude. Due to limited space availability, attendance at the workshop is by invitation only.