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Software documentation and augmented reality: love or arranged marriage?

Published: 08 November 2020 Publication History

Abstract

There is a significant rise in the availability, development and size of software projects in the present day. Many open source projects are reused or updated for various purposes that include fixing bugs in existing projects, development and maintenance of project extensions. Developers who interact with the projects might require documentation for better comprehension of the project and to develop extensions. Most of the software projects currently do not have sufficient documentation or it is not updated along with the project. If some projects have reasonably sufficient documentation, it is usually difficult to comprehend it either for maintenance or for reuse purposes. Considering the usefulness of Augmented Reality (AR) towards comprehension, we propose the vision of integrating the domains of augmented reality and software documentation, and specifically, visualization of software documentation using AR. In this paper, we present some of the directions that could be explored towards this vision and also present an example visualization scenario for API documentation using neural system metaphor. We see this paper as a basis for the future research direction of leveraging AR towards making documentation as a primary artifact in the software development process.

Supplementary Material

Auxiliary Teaser Video (fse20vr-p18-p-teaser.mp4)
This is a full video presentation of the vision of integrating software documentation and augmented reality.
Auxiliary Presentation Video (fse20vr-p18-p-video.mp4)
This is a full video presentation of the vision of integrating software documentation and augmented reality.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)An exploratory study of software artifacts on GitHub from the lens of documentationInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107425(107425)Online publication date: Feb-2024
  • (2023)DocMine: A Software Documentation-Related Dataset of 950 GitHub Repositories2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00062(407-411)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2022)CasdocProceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3524610.3527875(631-635)Online publication date: 16-May-2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEC/FSE 2020: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
November 2020
1703 pages
ISBN:9781450370431
DOI:10.1145/3368089
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 08 November 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Augmented Reality
  2. Software Documentation
  3. Visualization

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)An exploratory study of software artifacts on GitHub from the lens of documentationInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107425(107425)Online publication date: Feb-2024
  • (2023)DocMine: A Software Documentation-Related Dataset of 950 GitHub Repositories2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00062(407-411)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2022)CasdocProceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3524610.3527875(631-635)Online publication date: 16-May-2022

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